Robotic fleas to the rescue

by jennyaguilar on 29/11/08 at 9:59 am

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. This same school of thought inspired as much cyber gadgets now introduced in the market.

Imitating human form and assignment is the driving force of the I-SWARM project. Funded by EU, this project is aiming on developing a small army of robotic fleas with collective artificial intelligence. These robotic fleas are envisioned to be at work in laboratories, whose every single task should be performed jointly.

The usual task for robots is to move some object from one place to another or to follow an intricate path with different obstacles. As a plan for future I-SWARM robot developers speak about dividing the army into groups and giving each group a specified task on the shared problem so the colony will have a sort of complex skill.

With more than one type of working robots, there are different type models that has a role on different stages of work and were aimed to test one part or another. Powered by a tiny solar cell, this robotic gadget is four times smaller than a thumbnail.

A model that could work with batteries was considered to be big and needed a number of wheels to move. Without wheels robot can move with the help of vibration. And that’s it – no wheels mean small size and less weight.

Also every one in the swarm is equipped with an infrared port to exchange information with each other, and a processor of course. The “brains” of a robotic lice is an intricate thing, so is its operating system, which fits tight in eight kilobytes of memory and just two kilobytes of RAM.

Such robotic fleas could be useful in working in zones dangerous for people and many other possibilities.