Swarm Robotics Innovator Speaks at Lindenwood on Wednesday

Small armies of robots could be used to explore Mars, remove land mines, conduct search and rescue missions after earthquakes or even vacuum carpets. That could be where swarm robotics is taking us, said roboticist James McLurkin.

McLurkin, professor of computer science at Rice University in Houston, takes his inspiration from the behavior of swarms of ants and bees to develop programs and techniques to construct and program robots to perform individual tasks to work toward a common goal.

McLurkin will speak on “The Future of Robotics and Swarm Robotics Application” at 10 a.m. Wednesday at Lindenwood University’s J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts as part of its academic Speaker Series.

Students working on robotics projects throughout the area will attend the event and will get to meet with McLurkin after the lecture, said Paul Huffman, archivist with Lindenwood University’s Butler Library.

Huffman said he expects about 500 to 600 people to attend the event.

On Monday, McLurkin said orchestrating thousands of robots is a complex problem. But thousands of ants and bees manage to accomplish goals by working together without GPS or cell phones, he said.

 “Many simple things combine together to create something complex--you see that again and again in nature,” McLurkin said.

There may be underlying math on which researchers can use to base computer programs to organize robots, too, he said.

The applications for swarm robotics are nearly limitless, he said.

“We sent two robots to Mars. What if we sent 2,000?” McLurkin asked. “Even if we lost half of them, we still would have 1,000 robots exploring Mars. Smaller robots could lead larger robots to points of interest.”

McLurkin said he’s working toward three goals with swarm robotics. One is to enable the robots to coordinate movements effectively.

“If three or four people are in a room, we have a sense of the distance between us and the geometry involved,” he said. “If I want to move towards you, I simply turn towards you and walk over to you.”

But that’s a complicated task for robots, he said.

“What’s the simplest way to measure geometry on these robots in a way that we can make them cheap and lets them do their job?” he asked.

Reducing cost is his second goal. Purchasing large quantities of robots could be expensive, but McLurkin said he’s working toward a price point of $100 per robot, or $1,000 for a 10-pack of SwarmBots. That would enable a corporation or government to buy a large quantity to accomplish a task.

“Our third goal is to get these things to start moving things in our world,” he said. “There’s two Holy Grails in the robotics world. One is construction. The other is explosive ordinance remediation--picking up land mines.”

Locating land mines is difficult because engineers design them to be hard to find, McLurkin said.

But he’s confident that nature holds the key--and the math--to solving those problems.

“Nature solves its problems in simple ways,” he said. “Insects don’t need to be precise. Through their numbers and interactions, they accomplish their goals.”