Swarms of robots could one day be exploring space or doing dangerous jobs on Earth, say researchers. Promising prototypes of co-operating robots were on show at the Artificial Life XI conference this week.

Advances in technology mean it is now possible to create self-assembling robot chains as well as tiny robots for as little as £24. Roboticists say the swarms of robots could prove more adaptable and smarter than individual, self-contained ones.

“For a long time in robotics there was this focus on a ’smart machine’, an android that would make you breakfast and go out and buy your shopping,” said Dr Seth Bullock, the University of Southampton researcher chairing the Alife XI conference. “But that’s extremely challenging; it’s going to be far easier for us to engineer little simple things and rely on them to organise themselves.”
To that end, a group of undergraduate students at the University of Southampton has developed a swarm of identical, matchbox-sized robots, each of which costs just £24 to produce.

Demonstrated at the conference the prototypes showed how swarm robots can independently divide up tasks, with no central program controlling them. They skitter around, communicating as they encounter each other via the same kind of infrared technology used in mobile phones.

More info at the BBC website.

Today’s typical sensor nodes run on batteries, thus have a limited lifetime. Solar energy harvesting is an interesting complement or alternative. There are several systems built with unique set of requirements. However, not much has been done to formalize application driven constrains, model and systematize micro-solar design of energy subsystems.

We just stumbled over some neat research from Jaein Jeong et al, from UC Berkeley, that shed some light on this topic.

The authors develop a taxonomy of the micro-solar design space identifying key components, design choices, interactions, challenges, and trade-offs. Based on the analysis of two different systems (Heliomote and Trio) they propose design guidelines for future micro-solar powered systems (see paper, talk).

Furthermore, they present a systematic approach that composes models of the relevant pieces to appropriately select and size the components. The approach is demonstrated through the design of the HydroWatch weather node, micro-solar subsystem and network, in the context of a microclimate monitoring project in a deep forest setting (paper, talk).

Interestingly, they have found the speckled nature of the illumination in the forest environment dramatically affects the solar current in the panel which wouldn’t be improved by its larger size, but instead, by the arrangement of more and smaller cells connected in parallel. Also, the useful range of voltages from these panels is very limited and therefore proper coupling  of the electronics to profit on these constrains is as relevant as other optimizations.

Enjoy your readings.