Blog: Group Thinker: Researcher Gets $2.9 Million to Further Develop Swarm Intelligence

Group Thinker: Researcher Gets $2.9 Million to Further Develop Swarm Intelligence
Scientific American (01/13/10) Greenemeier, Larry

The European Research Council recently awarded a $2.9 million grant to Belgian Funds for Scientific Research's Marco Dorigo to develop a universal engineering methodology for designing and implementing swarm intelligence systems. Dorigo says swarm intelligence could provide a novel way of designing systems that are more autonomous and self-sufficient. "We believe that in the future, swarm intelligence will be an important tool for researchers and engineers interested in solving certain classes of complex problems," he says. Dorigo and his team have chosen certain areas to concentrate their research, including optimization, robotics, networks, and data mining. Dorigo has used swarm intelligence to solve complex human problems, such as routing trucks, scheduling airlines, and guiding military robots. He also founded the swarmanoid project, which aims to design, implement, and control a robotic system of small heterogeneous, dynamically connected, autonomous robots. "The swarmanoid that we intend to build will be comprised of numerous autonomous robots of three types: eye-bots, hand-bots, and foot-bots," according to the swarmanoid Web site. Foot-bots are used to transport objects on the ground, hand-bots can climb walls and manipulate objects, and eye-bots can fly around and provide information to the other robots.

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