Teaching robots to be team players with nature

This en masse behavior by individual organisms can provide separate and collective good, such as improving chances of successful mating propagation or providing security. Now, researchers have harnessed the self-organization skills required to reap the benefits of natural swarms for robotic applications in artificial intelligence, computing, search and rescue, and much more. They published their method on Aug. 3 in Intelligent Computing. "Designing a set of rules that, once executed by a swarm of robots, results in a specific desired behavior is particularly challenging," said corresponding author Marco Dorigo, professor in the artificial intelligence laboratory, named IRIDIA, of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. "The behavior of the swarm is not a one-to-one map with simple rules executed by individual robots, but rather results from the complex interactions of many robots executing the same set of rules."