Question: Other than to educate are there any other uses for the 'swarm'

Siobhan Duncan answered on 6 Mar 2017:

Dear Jimbob123x,

This is a really great question!

So they are great for education as they can help show people lots of robots doing really cool things. Swarm robots can be taught to behave like swarm animals in the wild, meaning that biologists can experiment using robots that act like animals.

My swarm robots would be used to solve any complex problems. Swarm robots can solve complex problems much better than any robot can do on their own.

But to better explain what I mean by a complex problem let me give you three examples.

In the first example, the only bouncing ball your class has just accidentally bounced into a field next to the school. No one saw exactly where it landed, you just know that within that field is the ball.

Is it better to send in one person to look for it? Or should the whole class work together to find the ball?

In the second example, imagine you are trying to build a house. You have all the materials you need in one corner of the garden. Is it better for one person to build the house? Or is it better to get many people building together?

For the third example, imagine your teacher needs someone to go the class across the corridor and borrow a chair. Is it better if one student does this task? Or would it be better for the entire class to go and get the chair?

In both the first and second examples, it’s much better when a lot of people work together to finish the task quickly. It is possible for one person to do it alone, but it might take a lot of time! These are both complex problems.

But in the third example, it would be crazy to send a whole class of students just to fetch one chair, so it makes more sense to just send one person. This is not a complex problem.

Well all these ideas are the same in swarm robotics. Just because you could solve a task using one very cool complicated robot, doesn’t mean that it won’t be done faster or better by using lots of simple robots working together.

For example a swarm of ants in nature build their nests, fetch food, transport large objects, travel across rivers or gaps, and defend the nest – all using group behaviour.

If we can build robots that can act in large groups, like ants do, then we can use them to solve problems best solved by groups. Such as searching, building, cleaning, etc…

I hope that this helps, please ask me more questions if I have not been clear, or if this answer has created more questions than it has answered 🙂

Siobhan