Microid Robots Meant to Act in Colony Swarms

The world belongs to the very small -- insects, microbes, molecules . . . It is past time that humans learned to use the power of "small squared" in the real world. Lots and lots of very small agents working together to manipulate real world objects. The possibilities are endless.

"The microids would be able to walk, run, jump, and pick up and move objects many times their own weight," Clark said. "A microid can also do what no insect or other microrobot can do, which is continue walking if flipped on its back. Who knows, maybe flight is next."

He also envisions the possibility of hordes of microids working in unison and communicating with each other to perform a complex task.

"You can't underestimate the power of having thousands of microids working together, much like ant colonies," he said.

The microids could be mass-produced using manufacturing technologies that are common to the semiconductor industry.

Purdue has filed a patent application on the concept.

The microids are designed to have the "tripod gait" for walking used by most insects - only three of six legs are on the ground at a time - which enables bugs to remain stable while traversing uneven terrain.

Each leg or mandible comprises a bundled triad of slender beams made of piezoelectric material, which generates electricity when compressed. This feature could enable the microids to harvest energy by taking advantage of vibration in the environment to recharge. _Physorg

Imagine planting and harvesting many acres of food crops and biomass crops using self-powered micro- and nano- robots. Powered by vibrational energy, solar energy, from heat or chemicals in the environment . . . Imagine using such robots to assemble homes and meeting places.

The military, espionage, and sabotage applications should be obvious without dwelling on them. Al Fin Futurologists take note of the negative applications, but prefer to spend most of their time developing positive uses for new technologies.

Mind Creation, Development, and Restoration

Creating new artificial minds is the holy grail of cognitive science -- that bastard branch of science that borrows shamelessly from psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, electrical engineering, physics, nanotechnology -- and any other area of thought that may serve. One interesting approach to mind-creation borrows from the insect world in an attempt to create a "hive mind" or "swarm mind."

With an eye on the potential that swarm intelligence holds for the development of information technology and robotics, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded a $2.9-million ERC Advanced Grant Tuesday to Marco Dorigo to help the research director for the Belgian Funds for Scientific Research (FNRS) and co-director of IRIDIA (the Free University of Brussels's artificial intelligence lab) further his work engineering swarm intelligence systems.


...As far back as 1991 Dorigo used his knowledge of ant behavior to create mathematical procedures that could be used to solve complex human problems, such as routing trucks, scheduling airlines or guiding military robots, Peter Miller wrote in a July 2007 National Geographic article.


The Italian-born researcher is also the founder of the "swarmanoid" project, whose goal is to design, implement and control a distributed robotic system of small heterogeneous, dynamically connected, autonomous robots. "The swarmanoid that we intend to build will be comprised of numerous (about 60) autonomous robots of three types: eye-bots, hand-bots and foot-bots," according to the swarmoid Web site Swarm-Bots. Foot-bots are used to transport things on the ground, and hand-bots climb walls and manipulate objects, whereas eye-bots fly, providing information to the other units, according to Miller. _SciAm

Such a "bottom-up" approach to intelligent behaviour will be incredibly useful to future efforts to create "artificial general intelligence" (AGI). Complex swarm behaviours are evolved rather than programmed -- emerging from simple, low level rules and constraints. Neuronal group behaviours in brains are likely to use many closely analogous mechanisms.

Of course, we have had an excellent working example of the evolution of intelligence (and consciousness) in the human fetus, neo-nate, and infant. In fact, complex learning may take place much earlier in fetal development than scientists previously thought.

In a study published in July in Child Development, researchers from the Netherlands reported short-term memory in 30- to 38-week-old fetuses. First they put a vibrating, honking device on the abdomens of 93 preg­nant women. The fetuses quickly “habituated”—that is, they figured out that the noise was not dangerous. When they heard it again 10 minutes later, they did not squirm and their heart rates did not escalate. “It’s like getting used to a New York train station,” says lead author J. G. Nijhuis, a professor of obstetrics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. “It is a learning capability to distinguish safe from unsafe stimuli. It is a primitive form of memory.”


The 34-week-old fetuses even recalled the sound four weeks later. “What this study clearly says is at least beginning at 30 weeks and possibly before that, the fetal brain is starting to lay down short-term memories and might even be laying down some long-term memories,” says Rahil Briggs, director of Healthy Steps at Montefiore Medical Center and assistant professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “This is a sensitive period of development.” _SciAm

One of the most tragic events in life, is the departure of intelligence and /or consciousness from a person whose body goes on living. A great deal of effort is being expended to find ways to restore consciousness and cognition that has been lost.

Now a few hardy pioneers are finding innovative ways to help. Their technology of choice is deep-brain stimulation (DBS). The method has been much in the public eye as a way to ameliorate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Electrodes are implanted into a region just below the thalamus, the quail-egg-shaped structure in the center of the brain. When the electric current is turned on, the rigor and tremors of this movement disorder disappear instantly.
Over the past 15 years neurosurgeon Takamitsu Yamamoto and his colleagues at the Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo stimulated parts of the intralaminar nuclei (ILN) of the thalamus in VS and MCS patients. These regions were targeted because they are involved in producing arousal and in controlling widespread activity throughout the cortex. Indeed, according to the late neurosurgeon Joseph Bogen of the University of Southern California, the ILN is the one structure absolutely essential to consciousness.


Patients react immediately when the ILN is stimulated in this manner: they open their eyes, their pupils dilate, they make meaningless sounds, their blood pressure increases and their EEG activity desynchronizes. This arousal reaction by itself is not of therapeutic utility and does not predict recovery. But the long-term effect of such stimulation was encouraging: eight of 21 patients transitioned from the unresponsive VS to the more communicative MCS condition, and the five MCS patients who were stimulated emerged from their bedridden state, with four of them able to enjoy life back at home. _SciAm

The only thing worse than the prospect of millions of humans walking around with DBS (deep brain stimulation) electrodes going into their brains, is the prospect of those millions lying in bed mindless and helpless.  No, actually, there are many worse prospects.

The DBS approach will go only so far.  We will need to make use of new "brain-bridging" prosthetic brain implants, which bypass areas of brain damage while new brain tissue is being seeded and scaffolded.  Longer term brain prosthesis which monitor attempts at intra-cerebral communication, and provide automatic routing and transfer functions will also come into use.

This is the age of bastard sciences such as cognitive science.  An inter-disciplinary world that begs, borrows, steals, and collaborates within and between disciplines will be vital to the emergence of the next level.

Making Zombies

Human history is full of examples of ambitious people who discovered the "back door password" into human minds. Using this key, turning human beings into zombie followers was not so difficult.

Throughout history, it seems as though individuals had the ability to sway others to follow them no matter where they [led]. In the las[t] century, both Hitler and Mussolini had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will.

...Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group.

"It makes us feel as though we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's welfare as being as important as our own," he says.

...Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause....

...our brains are geared to mimic our peers.

"We are set up for 'auto-copy'," says Haidt.

Neurological evidence seems to back this idea. Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus. _Source

Populist leaders who have learned the secret can seemingly come out of nowhere to control an entire population. While it appears that they have turned thinking humans into complete zombies, the true situation is more complex. The potential for zombification always existed, waiting for the proper key to fit the lock.

Far more interesting to me are the "skeptics", the "resisters". Independent thinking persons who generate their own goals and stoke their own energies to create their own lives, are the starting material for the next level. Zombies and would-be zombies are flimsy, too subject to the changing winds and tides. To create a next-level human, one must start with the best materials.

It is instructive to observe the history of the American colonies, as they evolved over time. Stubborn and strong minded persons tended to flock together and created one environment, while more pliable and group-minded persons flocked to create a different environment. As settlements of even the strongest-minded individuals evolved, natural flocking tendencies began to predominate, and the more independent persons migrated out to more open territory that required a tougher-minded sort.

There is little question but that the relative strength of independence vs. conformity lies at least partially in genetic factors. Environment no doubt plays a strong part in strengthening innate tendencies toward either group-think or independence. Executive function combined with IQ and other personality and character traits, all are both largely heritable and strongly influenced by environment. Why should zombie-potential be any different?

And perhaps we do not need to go back in history at all, to see successful examples of zombification?

Hive Minds and Collective Intelligences

Utopian visions of a technological singularity occupy the individual minds of tens of thousands of Earthers. At the recent Singularity conference in San Jose, attendees were reminded that the human mind remains far and away the most capable cognitive machine in the known universe. But that did not stop them from dreaming utopian visions of all-powerful artifical intelligences, and machines capable of "storing" human consciousness, simulating a full-sensory paradise for its uploaded minds.

From there, the idea of a collective mind, a mental "super-organism" of global proportions, arises easily. Particularly for anyone who has been exposed to the Star Trekkian vision of "The Borg." Kevin Kelly's essay on the Superorganism elaborates on the concept of consciousness evolving out of the growing internetwork of networked co-evolving humans-machines.

An interesting web attempt at creating an evolving future-oriented collective intelligence, is The Space Collective. Combining clear speculative thinking with crisp visual artistic values, TSC is a future oriented website worth visiting more than once.

Our own brain-minds are an example of a hive mind of sorts, at least a modular consciousness. Humans spontaneously organise socially as families, clans, tribes, guilds, militias, hunting parties, religions, etc. Further, had any ancient astronaut observers of human civilisation taken the time to film time-lapse documentaries of the rise and fall of human city-states and cultures, a definite social insect-like quality of the onset and decay of culture would be clear.

Humans are desperately in need of an "organising principle" to lead them to a more enlightened and sustainable era of safe-branching futures. While socialist economics is known to be a destructive dead-end, it continues to attract more blindly utopian and less mentally endowed humans like moths to a flame. And while capitalist economics combined with libertarian politics provides the excess wealth needed to finance evolutionary projects, the deeper level of guidance needed to help choose workable long-term directions of effort is lacking.

Hives too often degenerate into mobs, as more personally powerful individual interests assert themselves in counter-productive directions, assuming amplitudes strong enough to skew the crowd away from ordinary and more productive activities.

Religions have always failed in the end, as have philosophies and ideologies. Whatever guiding principle an enlightened group mind may adopt, it should be simple, subject to test by reality, and resistant to co-option by charismatic or ruthlessly powerful individuals.

Swarming and Flocking--Learning from Natural Behaviours

Swarming behaviour is typical of animal populations--from insects to fish to birds to mammals. But is it possible for humans in the developed world to learn something from the swarming behaviours of animals?

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

Source

People are indeed learning from the swarming behaviours of ants, bees, birds, caribou, and other animals. The article above has the details.

Another fascinating look at how humans can learn from swarming and flocking behaviour is the book "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly. You can read Kelly's excellent book online at the above link. If you have been feeding your mind mostly on either junk food or dry scholarly work, consider taking regular recreational breaks to read portions of Kelly's entertaining and provocative work.

Information scientists and engineers are looking at swarms as models for artifical intelligences and robotics controllers. This is a form of biomimetics, from the bottom up. Rodney Brooks and Hod Lipson typify this bottom up research for robotics and AI.

One of the key points to draw from the effectiveness of swarm behaviour in the animal world for predator and prey, is that it depends upon the individual competence of the members of the swarm. If too many of the individual members are incompetent, the swarm cannot function.

This is the danger of dysfunctional institutions of education, for human society--which has its own swarm-like behaviour. Dysfunctional schools and universities ruled by dysfunctional ideologies, create dysfunctional and vulnerable societies. That is the problem with an excessively narcissistic, psychologically neotenous, and academically lobotomised society. It is incompetent on such a large scale that it can no longer defend itself from either internal or external threats.

Is That A Robot In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

Robots are getting smaller--micro-robots, or microbots as they are called. Small and almost invisible, but with good optics. It is not impossible that you are being watched by a robot at this very moment. Especially if you are a terrorist.

Israel is developing a robot the size of a hornet to attack terrorists. And although the prototype will not fly for three years, killer Micro Air Vehicles, or MAVs, are much closer than that.

British Special Forces already use 6-inch MAV aircraft called WASPs for reconnaissance in Afghanistan. The $3,000 WASP is operated with a Gameboy-style controller and is nearly silent, so it can get very close without being detected. A new development will reportedly see the WASP fitted with a C4 explosive warhead for kamikaze attacks on snipers. One newspaper dubbed it "The Talibanator."

Source.

Other engineers are developing microbots for exploring difficult to access caves and other planets.

In Phase I, we wanted to focus on robotic units that were small, very numerous (hence expendable), largely autonomous, and that had the mobility that was needed for getting into rugged terrains. Based on Dr. Dubowsky's ongoing work with artificial-muscle-activated robotic motion, we came up with the idea of many, many, tiny little spheres, about the size of tennis balls, that essentially hop, almost like Mexican jumping beans. They store up muscle energy, so to speak, and then they boink themselves off in various directions. That's how they move.

We've calculated that we could probably pack about a thousand of these guys into a payload mass the size of one of the current MERs (Mars Exploration Rovers). That would give us the flexibility to suffer the loss of a large percentage of the units and still have a network that could be doing recon and sensing, imaging, and perhaps even some other science functions.
AM: How do all these little spheres co-ordinate with each other?

PB: They behave as a swarm. They relate to each other using very simple rules, but that produces a great deal of flexibility in their collective behavior that enables them to meet the demands of unpredictable and hazardous terrain. The ultimate product that we're envisioning is a fleet of these little guys being sent to some promising landing site, exiting from the lander and then making their way over to some subsurface or other hazardous terrain, where they deploy themselves as a network. They create a cellular communication network, on a node-to-node basis.

More.

You can find movies of microbots and scholarly papers here.

Here is a report discussing Micro-Air Vehicle research for the US Air Force.

You can read about an earlier micro-copter and view a movie of the micro-bot flying here. State of the art microbots now are much smaller and potentially more letal.

If you could teach a continuously deformable microbot to fly, there is no end to the amount of mischief such a sneaky little bugger could create.

Military Robots--Reducing Human Casualties

The natural weapon for an advanced combatant to use against a less technologically advanced enemy--especially in a guerilla war--is robots. Muslim guerilla fighters hide behind noncombatants, and attempt to draw in as many enemy as possible for either an ambush or a suicide attack. By sending in robots equipped with telepresence, the enemy aim is foiled, and it becomes easier to separate the guerilla fighters from civilian noncombatants.

A recent VOA newstory discusses the use of robots on the modern battlefield:

"We're trying to keep the American troops out of harm's way. They do reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition, so what we're trying to do is develop the technology to replace the soldier in those particular tasks".

And it is hoped the technology could reduce the carnage. One robot has taken years to develop. It is able to make its way through complicated terrains -- without being accompanied by a human -- using cameras, lasers and acoustic sensors.

"So we're replacing a soldier driving a vehicle with a robotic vehicle," says Collins. "They're performing very similar tasks but now, of course, the soldier is no longer directly in the line-of-fire for the enemy."

Robot Warriors
With the toll on U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pressure is on to develop this technology quickly. But scientists say it could be 10 years before unmanned ground robots are used in actual war situations, because complex technology takes time to perfect.

The military is spending half a million dollars a year at this university developing an unmanned ground vehicle that uses similar technology to aircraft drones already in use. In 2004, the U.S. government spent more than $60 billion on this kind of research and development.

Source.

The Future Combat System (FCS) is being planned to integrate several types of robots together in the overall battlefield:

In the battlefield, FCS will link soldiers with manned and unmanned ground and air platforms and sensors. Ultimately, FCS will allow U.S. troops to be fast and versatile, as part of the Pentagon’s vision of the Future Force Warrior. For more information, see www.boeing.com/fcs.

The troops love UGVs in Iraq and Afghanistan for severe environments and want more combat-capable ones as soon as possible, says Brad Curran, senior analyst at Frost & Sullivan’s San Antonio office. Plans are being discussed to add weapons capability to UGVs-such as 0.50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers, he adds.

Down the road there will be even bigger UGVs that can form a supply route to reduce the risk of casualties from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are causing so many deaths in Iraq, Curran says.

“The National Defense Authorization Act of 2001 set the goal that by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the Armed Forces be unmanned,” Dyer says. Among the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)-funded projects iRobot is working on to help achieve this goal is iRobot Swarm.

The iRobot Swarm project was sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va. “It represents the state of the art in algorithms, hardware, and user interfaces for large swarms of autonomous robots,” Dyer continues. “The goal of the Swarm project was to develop distributed algorithms for robotic swarms composed of hundreds of individual robots. Our algorithms are designed to be completely scalable, and to function with groups of 10 to 10,000 robots, and the development platform is the world’s largest swarm, with more than 100 individual robots.”

A big advantage of UGVs is the amount of payloads-weapons and sensors-that can be placed on them because they are digital platforms, Dyer says. In this manner they are much like the “F-18 EF, which has about 30 different weapons and sensor payloads on a digital platform.”

Under FCS three types of revolutionary UGVs are envisioned: the iRobot Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV), the BAE Systems Armed Robotic Vehicle (ARV), and the Lockheed Martin Multifunction Utility/Logistics Equipment (MULE).

Much more at Source.

This NewStatesman article looks even deeper into future military robot plans:

War will progressively cease to be the foggy, confusing, equalising business it has been for centuries, in which the risks are always high, everyone faces danger and suffers loss, and the few can humble the mighty. Instead, it will become remote, semi-automatic and all-knowing, entailing less and less risk to American lives and taking place largely out of the sight of news cameras. And the danger is close to home: the coming wars will be the "war on terror" by other names, conflicts that know no frontiers. The remote-controlled war coming tomorrow to Khartoum or Mogadishu, in other words, can happen soon afterwards, albeit in moderated form, in London or Lyons.

This is no geeky fantasy. Much of the hardware and software already exists and the race to produce the rest is on such a scale that US officials are calling it the "new Manhattan Project". Hundreds of research projects are under way at American universities and defence companies, backed by billions of dollars, and Donald Rumsfeld's department of defence is determined to deliver as soon as possible. The momentum is coming not only from the relentless humiliation of US forces at the hands of some determined insurgents on the streets of Baghdad, but also from a realisation in Washington that this is the shape of things to come. Future wars, they believe, will be fought in the dirty, mazy streets of big cities in the "global south", and if the US is to prevail it needs radically new strategies and equipment.

Only fragments of this story have so far appeared in the mainstream media, but enough information is available on the internet, from the comments of those in charge and in the specialist press to leave no room for doubt about how sweeping it is, how dangerous and how imminent.

Military omniscience is the starting point. Three months ago Tony Tether, director of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon's research arm, described to a US Senate committee the frustration felt by officers in Iraq after a mortar-bomb attack. A camera in a drone, or unmanned aircraft, spotted the attackers fleeing and helped direct US helicopters to the scene to destroy their car - but not before some of those inside had got out. "We had to decide whether to follow those individuals or the car," he said, "because we simply didn't have enough coverage available." So some of the insurgents escaped. Tether drew this moral: "We need a network, or web, of sensors to better map a city and the activities in it, including inside buildings, to sort adversaries and their equipment from civilians and their equipment, including in crowds, and to spot snipers, suicide bombers or IEDs [improvised explosive devices] . . . This is not just a matter of more and better sensors, but, just as important, the systems needed to make actionable intelligence out of all the data."

....Eight square miles of Jakarta have been digitised and simulated in three dimensions. That will not surprise computer gamers, but Urban Resolve goes much further: the detail extends to the interiors of 1.6 million buildings and even the cellars and sewers beneath, and it also includes no fewer than 109,000 moving vehicles and people. Even the daily rhythms of the city have been simulated. The roads, says one commentator, "are quiet at night, but during weekday rush hours they become clogged with traffic. People go to work, take lunch breaks and visit restaurants, banks and churches."

Digitise any target city and integrate this with the flow of data from many thousands of sensors and cameras, stationary and mobile, and you have something far more powerful than the regular snapshots today's satellites can deliver. You have continuous coverage, around corners and through walls. You would never, for example, lose those mortar bombers who got out of their car and ran away.

All this brings omniscience within reach. The US web-based magazine DefenseWatch, which monitors developments in strategy and hardware, recently imagined the near-future scenario of an operation in the developing world in which a cloud of minute, networked sensors is scattered like dust over a target city using powerful fans. Directed by the sensors, unmanned drones patrol the city, building up a visual and audio picture of every street and building. "Every hostile person has been identified and located," continues the scenario. "From this point on, nobody in the city moves without the full and complete knowledge of the mobile tactical centre."

Much more atSource.

Eventually, all the robots, sensors, controllers--even weapons--will be manufactured by robots--robot factories. When you factor in artificial intelligence, there will be no need to have a human finger on the trigger. Are you scared yet?

Guerilla fighters who hide behind women and children in order to perpetrate suicidal ambushes to kill as many soldiers as possible, are the main driving impetus for a lot of this frightening weaponry. If there were another way to impart civilised behaviour to these violent fanatics, this advanced robotic killing technology would not be necessary. Unfortunately there will be unforeseen consequences of this technology, as always.

The better alternative is to go to the next level.