Swarm Engineering

Question 1

What is swarm engineering?

Answer 1

Engineering the collective behaviour of a group of agents for a desired purpose.

Question 2

What are the principles of swarm engineering?

Answer 2

• Swarm can solve complex problems that individuals could not solve
• Composed of large number of homogenous individuals, some of which may get lost of make mistakes without compromising the overall performance of the swarm
• Individuals are relatively incapable
• Interactions are based on simple behavioural rules either through direct interactions or stigmergy (pheromones)

Question 3

What is Reynold’s flocking?

Answer 3

• Boids are attracted to the swarm CoM
• Boids are repulsed from neighbouring boids
• Boid aligns its angle with those of neighbouring boids

Can be used to understand the movement of large colonies.

Question 4

What is Particle Swarm Optimisation?

Answer 4

• An optimisation algorithm inspired from birds trying to find the area with the highest concentration of food
• Each bird can communicate with their neighbours about how many insects are at its location and can remember their own location from where they found the highest concentration of food so far
• Brave: keeps flying in the same direction
• Conservative: fly back towards its own previous best position
• Swarm: move towards its best neighbour

Question 5

What is object collection?

Answer 5

• Robots move randomly
• Pick up objects that are alone
• Continue to move randomly
• Drop the object when they come across a pile with more than one object

Question 6

What is Ant Colony Optimisation?

Answer 6

• Robots follow path with a probability proportional to the amount of pheromone on the path
• They deposit pheromone as they move
• More pheromone is deposited when returning to the nest with food

Question 7

What is clustering?

Answer 7

• Ants display this clustering and sorting behaviour to pass gaps and build nests
• Mechanisms are stigmeric communication and positive/negative feedback
• Reconfigurable robots can use this to form morphologies suitable to a given task

Question 8

What can swarm engineering be used for?

Answer 8

• Environmental monitoring
• To establish a wireless communication network for users on the ground
• Smart ‘dust’, for use in medical applications to target specific object in the bloodstream