Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Surrounded by buzzing robots that end the session by performing in an orchestra, James McLurkin, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talks about distributed robotics and swarm behavior to a packed house. His work has its roots in “swarm intelligence”—the study of collective behavior in decentralised, self-organised systems. Think of ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, fish schooling, and many other examples in nature.During the last few hundred million years, nature has perfected such interactions. Now, scientists such as McLurkin want to get a better understanding of how these biological processes work and apply this knowledge to programming robots for doing complex tasks in groups. Perhaps, this is the ultimate interpretation of the Wisdom of Crowds thesis: individuals don’t have to be smart to produce very smart group outcomes. Did somebody mention Wikipedia? . . .
[ more Robot Swarms Invade Kentucky ]

More information:
Particle Swarms
Ant Algorithms
James McLurkin personal website
Distributed Algorithms for Dispersion in Indoor Environments using a Swarm of Autonomous Mobile Robots ( pdf )
Using Cooperative Robots for Explosive Ordnance Disposal (pdf )

See also:
Airjelly ( water based jellyfish like robots ) wow crowds in Germany