Swarming Robots Shuffle Through Field Tests

The four robotic “Swarmies” begin a test run at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The robots are autonomous and programmed to use random search methods to find resources.
Image Credit: NASA/Dmitri Gerondidakis

The approach could be put to use in the future in service of astronauts making the journey to Mars

Months of lab work has led to this chilly day – by Florida standards – with four small, wheeled robots moving around the parking lot outside the Launch Control Center while their leader, Kurt Leucht, keeps electronic tabs on them using a laptop. He carries the laptop around as he tracks each of the four machines, occasionally tapping one off an obstacle or looking at the vehicle’s line of sight to figure out what its sensors are seeing.

Together, the robots are known as the “Swarmies” and it’s not their hardware that makes them noteworthy, but rather the coding each carries in its silicon brain that make them search the same way ants do. Each of the robots has its own camera and a set of hazard-avoidance sensors. They are rolling around looking for barcode sheets and leaving digital trails to tell the others when a whole lot of bar codes are found in one place.

“We’re trying to prove that there’s more efficient ways of searching than some other more common ways,” Leucht said. “It works really well for ants and we think it could work just as well for robots.”

Leucht isn’t controlling the robots in the way a radio-control hobbyist does – he’s not doing their thinking for them. Instead, he’s letting the software he and his team have been working on for months do the work of operating each robot independently. Besides, that’s the way mechanical creatures like this would have to operate on Mars if they are to be effective resource gatherers.

Working with computer engineer Caylyn Shelton at Kennedy and a research team at the University of New Mexico Biological Computation Lab, Leucht is using this parking lot test and dozens more just like it to try to see whether a search method based on foraging behaviors is more effective and productive than a conventional approach of scouring every square inch of an area or a purely random search. It is the same approach used by ants for eons to find and collect food and material.

The approach could be put to use in the future in service of astronauts making the journey to Mars.

One idea among many is to dispatch a corps of small robots capable of searching the Red Planet for water-ice and then digging it up for processing into breathing air and rocket fuel. The robots – purpose-built, flightworthy machines loaded with software like the coding Leucht is working on – would arrive at Mars months or years ahead of astronauts and use the lead-time to build up a storehouse of resources that would be waiting for the explorers from earth.

With each robot being small and weighing less than 10 pounds, a large fleet of searcher/gatherer machines could be sent into space on a single launch. With 100 robots tooling around on the surface, it also wouldn’t matter so much if several broke down because there would be plenty more to do the work.

Read more: Swarmies Shuffle Through Field Tests