SELF-ORGANIZING ROBOTS INSPIRED BY TERMITE COLONIES
DEMONSTRATE SWARM-LIKE INTELLIGENCE
On the plains of Namibia, millions of tiny termites are
building a mound of soil—an 8-foot-tall “lung” for their underground nest.
During a year of construction, many termites will live and die, wind and rain
will erode the structure, and yet the colony’s life-sustaining project will
continue.
Inspired by the termites’ resilience and collective
intelligence, a team of computer scientists and engineers at the Harvard School
of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for
Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has created an
autonomous robotic construction crew. The system needs no supervisor, no eye in
the sky, and no communication: just simple robots—any number of robots—that
cooperate by modifying their environment.