Scientists built a swarm of robots inspired by the behavior of foraging ants. The goal was to see if we have these limited, not technologically sophisticated robots, could we get them to cooperate and collectively achieve some goal. "We were hoping to show that we would be able to sort of engineer some small kinds of emergent properties from the interactions of robots," he says.
Imagine you were going to Mars with a swarm of robots, and you needed to send those robots out foraging. How would you program them? A traditional top-down approach to programming would mean programming what every single robot is going to do, and that's going to get complicated fast.
So in this episode, we're joined by Melanie Moses, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Melanie is going to explain how you can take lessons from complexity science, and utilise a bottom-up approach to programming a swarm. In other words, she's going to explain how you can program the robots to interact with one another. And if you thought you'd heard the end of scaling or power laws, then you're in for a surprise, because Melanie is going to share how scaling fits in with her work on getting robots to work as a team.
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This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.