Homeland Security News Wire - February 28, 2014
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. A Harvard University release reports that 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,
inspired by the termites’ resilience and collective intelligence, 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.
Harvard’s TERMES
system demonstrates that collective systems of robots can build
complex, three-dimensional structures without the need for any central
command or prescribed roles. The results of the four-year project were
presented this week at the AAAS 2014 Annual Meeting and published in the 14 February issue of Science.
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