Thursday, February 13, 2014

Collective construction

Termite colonies build tremendous, complicated mounds, acting with no central control or careful advance planning. These social insects provide a fantastic proof of principle that (relatively) simple agents, acting independently with access only to local information, can build amazing things. How could we build and program robot swarms—artificial termite colonies—to build things for us? We want a human user to be able to give such a swarm a high-level description of what they want built, and have a guarantee that the system will build that thing, without the user having to get into the details of how it's done.

Read more about earlier work or the more recent TERMES project, which I co-lead with Radhika Nagpal.

Main Researcher: http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jkwerfel/
Spanish-related article: http://www.elmundo.es/ciencia/2014/02/13/52fd18dae2704e702e8b457e.html


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