The conference on Artificial Life is being held in Winchester and during that conference a new low cost platform for swarm robotics research will be presented. Swarm robotics platform makes it possible to make robots for a low cost of £24.00 each and the team employed motors normally used in mobile phone vibration.

These motors have been designed to attach to circuit boards during the standard manufacturing process thus removing the requirement for the manual assembly of robots and hence bringing the cost of a swarm of robots low enough to be use on a typical research project.

Swarm robotic platforms are used to investigate emergence behavior, and allow the study of swarm behavior via physical stimulation thus giving real world constraints and experimental scope that is unattainable with software stimulation on its own.

Teacher of Biorobotic at ECS, Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner, says: “This is truly exciting: now we can order robots from the same UK companies that regularly make circuit boards for our projects–for them it is just a circuit board they can mass-produce like any other, but actually it is a complete functional robot.”

Source — slashphone