Vision

Aiming at engineering a quarter of a century ahead, the science of robot swarms now


Since prehistoric times, we have created a wide variety of artifacts and have made use of the functions they produce in our daily lives. Today, we are constantly receiving physical, temporal, and spiritual benefits from these highly developed artifacts. Artifacts have developed to perform a variety of functions as tools, as means, as substitutes, or as something completely new that did not exist in the world. It could be said that artifacts have come to transcend living organisms if limited to specific functions, such as flying and running.

However, if we look closely at living organisms, we find that they possess a myriad of functions that are completely unmatched by man-made objects. A typical example is “reproduction (self-reproduction). This would be in the field of evolutionary biology, but the scope of its coverage is so deep and wide that it is not easily accessible from the academic field of artifacts.

On the other hand, there are many functions that have not yet been fully imitated, even if they are not that highly complex. One of them is “swarming” behavior. In the ecology of social insects such as ants, honeybees, and bees, the individual birds, fish, and bees seem to move randomly without any glimpse of their intentions, but when viewed as a whole group, they are highly intelligent and exhibit superior abilities that cannot be achieved by a single individual. It is generally believed that this is due to the function of self-organization. According to animal behavior, some altruistic or cooperative behaviors are observed between individuals, and these behaviors are considered to occur in an autonomous and decentralized manner in the entire herd, leading to self-organization.

In this laboratory, we would like to explore how to realize this herding function in artificial objects. In recent years, the field of “swarm robotics” (SR) has been attracting much attention, focusing on robots as artifacts. From an engineering point of view, there are of course a wide range of actual tasks to be performed by robots, and among them, applications to tasks that are difficult or impossible to accomplish with conventional robots due to their high complexity are expected. Killer applications include exploratory activities and cooperative shared tasks in hazardous areas where humans cannot easily operate, such as disaster sites and space environments. From a near-future perspective, the cost of designing and manufacturing a “robot swarm” can be reduced because the design of a single robot can be made relatively simple and mass production can be expected to be effective. Furthermore, it is no exaggeration to say that the industrial applications of “robot swarms” are unlimited, since they can be highly versatile without being limited to specific tasks.

Since the problem-solving method of swarming has been acquired by living organisms through billions of years of evolution, we believe that learning from actual living organisms is the main stream.

In this laboratory, we take this seriously and explore “robot swarms."