This past Thursday night, the Rensselaer Union Speakers’ Forum welcomed robotics master James McLurkin to DCC 308. He visited RPI during Diversity Week, commemorating the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. McLurkin was representing the iRobot company, and he discussed a robot swarm project that he is managing.
McLurkin opened his presentation by discussing intelligence in general and what exactly it means to be intelligent. He posed many questions to the audience, including whether or not a body was needed to possess intelligence. This got the audience thinking about floating heads at first, but furthermore opened up the debate on robotic intellect. He showed slides of a few robots that have been very beneficial to organizations, like the iRobot Packbot, which is a tactical resource used by military troops. The robot will enter a room or building ahead of the troops in case there are enemies or booby traps. This has saved many lives, as robots now face explosives or bullets instead of people.
He then started focusing on the swarm robots that he had brought along for demonstrations. These are five inches tall with behavioral LEDs, a radio, a camera, an audio system, and of course communication capabilities with the rest of the swarm. They are useful for when group tactics are required for “dangerous, dirty, and boring” jobs, like alerting firemen of hot spots or helping people trapped in burning buildings.
Then it was time for the demonstrations, which started with a simple seven-robot chain. These seven were self-selected to make the chain and separated from the rest of the group to move around the stage. However, they could not be more than approximately two meters from the other group or charging dock, as their infrared communication does not work outside that range. The audience noted the noises and songs coming from the robots depending on what operation they were performing. McLurkin commented, “I got to have the final say on all the music.”
After a few basic tasks, McLurkin asked them to get in a line in numerical order. Each robot had a distinct number associated with it. Each somehow knew if it was the highest or lowest and moved to make the line’s endpoints. The middle robots ordered themselves by finding a higher and lower number to be in the middle of.
Following the displays and a few questions by the audience, McLurkin went back to his presentation and discussed how insect behaviors give insight to robot interaction. He used ants, bees, and wasps as examples, and showed an animation of ants foraging for food by following the strongest scent trail—meaning that if the food is closer, that worker bee will return to the hive faster. However, these behaviors exhibit distributed systems, which make swarm robots harder to program. McLurkin is working on finding the easiest way to code harder tasks based on simpler operations.
While the end of McLurkin’s presentation turned into a motivational speech, the information about just how robots can assist humans and the demonstrations were very interesting and educational. For those students in the audience taking LITEC or Accelerated IED, the possibility of working with swarm robots in the future made all the busywork and stress seem worthwhile.
