Thanks to a post on Leslie Marsh’ blog, I discovered this BBC article that summarises some of the swarm robotics demos that were on show at the Alife XI conference this week. The article is accompanied by a small video where small autonomous robots divide up tasks in a full decentralized manner (I can’t show here the movie since it is protected by the BBC). Beyond this performance, the interesting thing with this robots is their price. They only cost 24£ each (about 45$) according their designer, Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner from the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group of the University of Southampton. Indeed they are build from surface mount motors from mobile phone vibrators so the whole robot can be made on a standard production line. They do not require special components or hand assembly. More information about these robots can be found in this article on ElectronicWeekly.com.

Swarms illuminating a street

Behind these swarms are a set of sensors that perceive the presence of pedestrians, cars, cycles or any other moving entities. These sensors interact with a multi-layered cellular automata that controls the illumation and supports the self-organization of the system as a response to the presence and movements of entities inside it. This ambient intelligence system is not aimed at providing some form of service to its users, but its goal is rather to enhance the experience of people moving inside such illuminated streets. I did not manage to find whether or not they were able to build their device, but I definitively want to try it!

“In this paper we investigate the flexibility of foraging behavior in the leaf-cutting ant Atta colombica, both at the individual and collective levels, following a change in the physical properties of their environment. We studied in laboratory conditions the changes occurring in foraging behavior when a height constraint was placed 1 cm above part of the trail linking the nest to the foraging area. We found that the size and shape of the fragments of foraging material brought back to the nest were significantly modified when the constraint was placed on the trail: independent of their size, forager ants cut smaller and rounder fragments in the presence of a height constraint than in its absence. This size adjustment does not require any direct sensory feedback because it occurred when the ants cut fragments in the foraging area; no further cutting was done when they encountered the constraint. This points to the existence of a template that ants store and use as a reference to adjust their reach while cutting. Remarkably, despite the decrease in the foraging material brought to the nest per capita the colony was still able to improve its foraging performance by doubling the number of transporters. This study illustrates the flexibility of foraging behavior exhibited by an ant colony. It provides a rare example of insects finding an intelligent solution to a problem occurring in a foraging context, at both the individual and collective levels.”

And to illustrate these findings, hereafter is a short video that was published by the New Scientist:

Cette école est organisée avec le soutien du CNRS et de l’ANR et s’adresse principalement à des étudiants doctorants et des chercheurs appartenant à différentes disciplines scientifiques (éthologie, écologie, physique et mathématiques appliquées).

Cette école interdisciplinaire se donne comme objectif de fournir une présentation assez large des outils d’acquisition, de traitement statistique et de modélisation du déplacement d’organismes biologiques à différents niveaux d’organisation.

Cette école comprendra :

1. Des introductions générales aux outils d’acquisition et d’analyse des trajectoires,
2. Des cours d’introduction à l’analyse et à la modélisation des interactions entre organismes,
3. Des cours portant sur les modèles physiques et macroscopiques des déplacements collectifs,
4. Des ateliers portant sur l’analyse statistique de trajectoires et la simulation numérique de déplacements
5. Des conférences et tables rondes animées par des biologistes et physiciens autour de l’objet “déplacement”.

Pour plus de renseignements, vous pouvez consulter le site de l’école : http://cognition.ups-tlse.fr/biosys08/.

Authors are invited to submit their original and unpublished work in the areas including, but not limited to, the following:

1. Modeling and analysis of particle swarm optimization, Ant colony optimization, culture algorithm, foraging algorithm.

2. Optimization techniques in dynamic, multi-objective, constrained environment. Modeling and analysis of biological collective systems such as social insects colonies, school and flocking vertebrates.

3. Distributed computing, machine learning, data mining, data clustering, graph partitioning, and decision making based on swarm intelligence principles.

4. Theory and applications of swarm intelligence principles to real world problems including control systems, evolvable hardware, power system, sensor networks, bioinformatics, business and finance, supply-chain management, planning and operations in industrial systems, transportation systems, and others areas.

Important dates and dead-lines are:

• Tutorial/Special Session Proposals: April 15, 2008.
• Paper Submission: May 15, 2008.
• Notification: June 15, 2008.
• Camera-Ready: July 15, 2008.
• Conference: September 21-23, 2008.

From April 14th to 17th 2008 the fourth «Meeting in Ecology and Behaviour» will be held in Toulouse. The meeting is entirely organized by PhD and post-doc students and is dedicated to the wide field of Behavioural Ecology: a discipline at the intersection between Animal Behaviour, Ecology, and Evolution. The meeting will be held at the “Ecole Nationale de Formation Agronomique” (ENFA). All the talks will be held in English. Attendance to all talks is free of charge. More information are available at the following address: http://www.uappu.org/serl/pmwiki.php.

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Deux soirées, ouvertes au public, seront consacrées à une conférence plénière et à la projection d’un documentaire, toutes deux suivies d’un débat. / A plenary talk and a documentary projection followed by a debate will be opened to the public.

Pierre-Henri Gouyon, Professeur au Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris / Professor at the National Museum of Natural History
Titre de la conférence / Title of the conference: Génétique et évolution : recherche et société / Genetics and evolution: research and society.
Lundi 14 avril à 20h30 / Monday 14th April at 8.30 pm
Lieu : amphithéâtre du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Toulouse / Location: lecture hall of the Toulouse’s Museum of Natural History

Jérôme Orivel et Raphaël Jeanson, chercheurs au CNRS / researchers at the CNRS
Titre du documentaire : “L’organisation secrète des fourmis”, suivi d’un débat. / Title of the documentary: “Ants - Nature’s secret power”, followed by a debate.
Mardi 15 avril à 21h00 / Tuesday 15th April at 9 pm
Lieu : amphithéâtre 30 sur le campus de l’ Ecole Nationale de Formation Agronomique (ENFA). / Location: lecture hall 30 at the “Ecole Nationale de Formation Agronomique” (ENFA)

Alex Wild is among the most talented insect photographers that can be found by browsing the web. His two web galleries (myrmecos.net and alexanderwild.com) display some of the most beautiful photographs of ants I ever seen (as the one above which is the banner of his blog). He recently published on his blog (the Myrmecos Blog) some good tips and tricks for keeping ants quiet as they are photographed. Always useful when trying to take pictures of these tiny and speedy insects. He also put on his blog some other helpful photo technique articles.

I recently found an interesting interview of Iain Couzin on Edge.org. Iain Couzin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. His research focuses on understanding collective behaviours. In particular he is interested in how large-scale biological patterns result from the actions and interactions of the individual components of a system. He studies self-organized pattern formation in a wide range of biological systems, including ants, fish schools, bird flocks, locust/cricket swarms and human crowds. In this long interview, Iain Couzin delivers his thoughts about his own research activity and about the study of animal collective behaviours in general. Hereafter is the beginning of the interview.

“A fundamental question in biology is how the functioning of collective systems works—whether you are dealing with the function of a tissue and how the cells within a tissue interact, or whether you’re dealing with ecologies or even ecosystems. We really need to build a new understanding and new tools that allow us to integrate across these scales. People refer to top-down and bottom-up; in some sense we have to take both approaches to try to understand these systems.

There is no characteristic scale that is the right scale to observe a system—one of the reasons I studied animal groups is that the systems can be taken apart and put together very easily. Some of the models and the understanding that we get from how these groups function—we are all familiar with the dramatic collective patterns exhibited by schools of fish or flocks of birds—and the way we can take these systems—like an ant colony—apart to see how they really function gives us deep insights…” More here. ]]> http://www.simongarnier.com/ants-have-algorithms-iain-couzins-interview-on-edgeorg/feed/ http://www.simongarnier.com/scientific-american-reports-special-edition-on-robotics/ http://www.simongarnier.com/scientific-american-reports-special-edition-on-robotics/#comments Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:23:50 +0000 Simon Garnier http://www.simongarnier.com/scientific-american-reports-special-edition-on-robotics/ Scientific American has just published a special edition about robotics. It gathers many interesting articles about most of the current hot topics in robotics. Among them is a new version of “Swarm Smarts“, an article written by Eric Bonabeau and Guy Theraulaz in 2000 for the same journal, where the approach of swarm intelligence is well summarized. And if you are careful, you should find some pictures about my work with robots Alice.