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The thirty fifth convention on Neural Info Processing Methods (NeurIPS2021) featured eight invited talks. On this submit, we give a flavour of the ultimate presentation.
The collective intelligence of military ants, and the robots they encourage
Radhika’s analysis focusses on collective intelligence, with the overarching purpose being to know how massive teams of people, with native interplay guidelines, can cooperate to attain globally complicated behaviour. These are fascinating programs. Every particular person is miniscule in comparison with the large phenomena that they create, and, with a restricted view of the actions of the remainder of the swarm, they obtain putting coordination.
collective intelligence from an algorithmic point-of-view, the phenomenon emerges from many people interacting utilizing easy guidelines. When run by these massive, decentralised teams, these easy guidelines lead to very smart behaviour.
The topic of Radhika’s speak was military ants, a species which spectacularly exhibit collective intelligence. With none chief, hundreds of thousands of ants work collectively to self-assemble nests and construct bridge constructions utilizing their very own our bodies.
One specific side of research involved self-assembly of such bridges. Radhika’s analysis crew, which comprised three roboticists and two biologists, discovered that the ants created bridges adapt to site visitors stream and terrain. The ants additionally disassembled the bridge when the stream of ants had stopped and it wasn’t wanted any extra.
The crew proposed the next easy speculation to clarify this behaviour utilizing native guidelines: if an ant is strolling alongside, and experiences congestion (i.e. one other ant steps on it), then it turns into stationary and turns right into a bridge, permitting different ants to stroll over it. Then, if no ants are strolling on it any extra, it might probably stand up and depart.
These observations, and this speculation, led the crew to contemplate two analysis questions:
- May they construct a robotic swarm with gentle robots that may self-assemble amorphous constructions, similar to the ant bridges?
- May they formulate guidelines which allowed these robots to self-assemble momentary and adaptive bridge constructions?
There have been two motivations for these questions. Firstly, the purpose of transferring nearer to realising robotic swarms that may clear up issues in a selected surroundings. Secondly, the usage of an artificial system to raised perceive the collective intelligence of military ants.
Screenshot from Radhika’s speak
Radhika confirmed an illustration of the gentle robotic designed by her group. It has two toes and a gentle physique, and strikes by flipping – one foot stays hooked up, whereas the opposite detaches from the floor and flips to connect in a distinct place. This permits motion in any orientation. Upon detaching, a foot searches by means of area to search out someplace to connect. By utilizing grippers on the toes that may hook onto textured surfaces, and having a stretchable Velcro pores and skin, the robots can climb over one another, just like the ants. The robotic pulses, and makes use of a vibration sensor, to detect whether or not it’s in touch with one other robotic. A video demonstration of two robots interacting confirmed that they’ve efficiently created a system that may recreate the easy speculation outlined above.
With a view to examine the high-level properties of military ant bridges, which might require an enormous variety of robots, the crew created a simulation. Modelling the ants to have the identical traits as their bodily robots, they had been in a position to replicate the excessive degree properties of military ant bridges with their hypothesized guidelines.
You possibly can learn the round-ups of the opposite NeurIPS invited talks at these hyperlinks:
#NeurIPS2021 invited talks round-up: half one – Duolingo, the banality of scale and estimating the imply
#NeurIPS2021 invited talks round-up: half two – benign overfitting, optimum transport, and human and machine intelligence
tags: bio-inspired, c-Analysis-Innovation, Swarming
Lucy Smith
is Managing Editor for AIhub.
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