Intelligent Small World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation

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Intelligent Small World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation (I-Swarm) is a European research project to develop millimeter-scale robots for dangerous activities. It is coordinated by Jörg Seyfried at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. The robots operate on solar power and can communicate between each other.

Europe Continent in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere

Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. It comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia.

Solar power conversion of energy from sunlight into electricity

Solar power is the conversion of energy from sunlight into electricity, either directly using photovoltaics (PV), indirectly using concentrated solar power, or a combination. Concentrated solar power systems use lenses or mirrors and tracking systems to focus a large area of sunlight into a small beam. Photovoltaic cells convert light into an electric current using the photovoltaic effect.

Contents

Aims

The I-Swarm project aims to develop and produce a large scale swarm (up to 1,000 [1] ) of microrobots. [2]

Microbotics

Microbotics is the field of miniature robotics, in particular mobile robots with characteristic dimensions less than 1 mm. The term can also be used for robots capable of handling micrometer size components.

Robots

The robots' proposed size is 2 x 2 x 1 mm. This small size means that sensory and computational capabilities will be limited. This is to be compensated for by collective behavior and emerging swarm effects. [3] The robots will differ in the type of sensors, manipulators and the amount of computational power. [4]

The expression collective behavior was first used by Franklin Henry Giddings (1908) and employed later by Robert E. Park and Burgess (1921), Herbert Blumer (1939), Ralph Turner and Lewis Killian (1957), and Neil Smelser (1962) to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure, but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way. Use of the term has been expanded to include reference to cells, social animals like birds and fish, and insects including ants. Collective behavior takes many forms but generally violates societal norms. Collective behavior can be tremendously destructive, as with riots or mob violence, silly, as with fads, or anywhere in between. Collective behavior is always driven by group dynamics, encouraging people to engage in acts they might consider unthinkable under typical social circumstances.

Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

Activities

The robot swarm is expected to have a variety of applications, including micro assembly, biological, medical or cleaning tasks. [5]

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Micro air vehicle

A micro air vehicle (MAV), or micro aerial vehicle, is a class of miniature UAVs that has a size restriction and may be autonomous. Modern craft can be as small as 5 centimeters. Development is driven by commercial, research, government, and military purposes; with insect-sized aircraft reportedly expected in the future. The small craft allows remote observation of hazardous environments inaccessible to ground vehicles. MAVs have been built for hobby purposes, such as aerial robotics contests and aerial photography.

Utility fog

Utility fog is a hypothetical collection of tiny robots that can replicate a physical structure. As such, it is a form of self-reconfiguring modular robotics.

Ant colony optimization algorithms

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FLTK library

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Claytronics is an abstract future concept that combines nanoscale robotics and computer science to create individual nanometer-scale computers called claytronic atoms, or catoms, which can interact with each other to form tangible 3D objects that a user can interact with. This idea is more broadly referred to as programmable matter. Claytronics has the potential to greatly affect many areas of daily life, such as telecommunication, human-computer interfaces, and entertainment.

Pilotfish (company)

Pilotfish is a multidisciplinary design and innovation consultancy with offices in Amsterdam, Munich, and Taipei. The company is specialized in industrial design, user interface design, and mechanical engineering. The company covers the entire product development process from research and strategy to ideation, design, engineering, sourcing, tooling, and production.

i-Cybie

i-Cybie (爱赛比) is a robotic pet that resembles a dog. It was manufactured by Silverlit Toys Manufactory Ltd Hong Kong from 2000 to 2006. i-Cybie was developed for commercial distribution by Tiger Electronics. Outrageous International Hong Kong distributed the electronic pet from 2005 to 2006. The i-Cybie robotic dog responds to sound, touch, movement, and voice commands. The toy robot can autonomously recharge its batteries using a special docking station. I-Cybie was the first mass-produced toy that used advanced voice recognition technology.

Modular self-reconfiguring robotic systems or self-reconfigurable modular robots are autonomous kinematic machines with variable morphology. Beyond conventional actuation, sensing and control typically found in fixed-morphology robots, self-reconfiguring robots are also able to deliberately change their own shape by rearranging the connectivity of their parts, in order to adapt to new circumstances, perform new tasks, or recover from damage.

Symbrion

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Kalin Lindena is a German artist.

Wilesco company

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RoboBee tiny robot capable of flight

RoboBee is a tiny robot capable of partially untethered flight, developed by a research robotics team at Harvard University. The culmination of twelve years of research, RoboBee solved two key technical challenges of micro-robotics. Engineers invented a process inspired by pop-up books that allowed them to build on a sub-millimeter scale precisely and efficiently. To achieve flight, they created artificial muscles capable of beating the wings 120 times per second.

Christopher Csíkszentmihályi is an American artist and technologist. He is the European Research Area Chair of Human-Computer Interaction and Design Innovation at Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute.

Swarm robotic platforms apply swarm robotics in multi-robot collaboration. They take inspiration from nature. The main goal is to control a large number of robots to accomplish a common task/problem. Hardware limitation and cost of robot platforms limit current research in swarm robotics to mostly performed by simulation software. On the other hand, simulation of swarm scenarios that needs large numbers of agents is extremely complex and often inaccurate due to poor modelling of external conditions and limitation of computation.

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