The Swarm

An ant alone has enough strength to lift a weight that is 10 times its own, it does so to carry food from the place where it finds it to the nest. Imagine now a swarm of ants looking for food, together they have the power to coordinate and lift food that is proportionally big, and also the swarm enables the ant to hunt a prey that is too big for a single ant to hunt upon. This methodology of the swarm works not only at this micro level but also at a macro level where animals such as lions or hyenas hunt in groups to be more effective. Even the human species during the initial stages of development used to hunt in groups.

The swarm gives you the multitude of effects such as strength, intelligence and many others.

What if you could have a swarm of robots that could do the same work in a manner unapprehensive to a single robot. This is what Wiki says about swarm robotics: 

"Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physicalrobots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behaviour occurs."

The recent trends in robotics today is too get multiple robots to work together, but at the moment these parallel working robots don't  work as desired because of collisions and noise effects. Some tasks are too tough for a robot to solve on its own and that is when the idea of the swarm kicks in. Basically the idea is to have multiple robots synchronized to add up in effectiveness, like the ants they work together side by side, distributing different tasks to reduce time and the amount of work. Not a moment they will block each others way, and everything looks like a well-oiled machine.

The algorithmic format in which a swarm is built, is too tedious to understand at this macro level. Yet to give you an idea how it works we will explain a bit of the basic terminology. The type of programs written for the swarm generally are designed in a manner to sequentially carry out a command and avoid the possibility of a deadlock. This is done by sensors used in the robot that can detect the robots in the proximity and then carry out the task by forming a group. The advantages of swarms are huge but the morphology in how to work coordinated as a swarm is still new, and the various sensors have their own range and the algorithms sometimes cannot capture the action that is to be carried out due to the numerous conditional branching.

Here is a video to give you a glimpse of what a swarm is capable of. Enjoy!!