An award-winning IST research team has developed highly unusual mini-robots, or swarm-bots, that work as a team to overcome challenges. While their cooperative behaviour is inspired by the actions of the tiny ant, their abilities could eventually take them to outer space.
Imitating insects such as ants, highly mobile small robots can accomplish physical tasks that no individual robot of the same size could manage. But if more sophisticated versions appear, then such machines could complete coordinated tasks in a way that could revolutionise the way we think about our world today.
An IST project in the Future and Emerging Technologies programme called Swarm-bots has lead the field in this area, and as a result the project partners have gained a great deal of publicity for their work. Marco Dorigo of the Université Libre de Bruxelles coordinated the project, and explains what the team achieved.
“We produced thirty-five complete s-bots [the individual bots that make up one swarm-bot], and completed many experiments with them,” he says. Just 12 cm in diameter, these mini-robots are packed with computing power, sensors and actuators, he adds.
In one trial, the s-bots linked up to bridge and thus pass over a hole in the ground. In another they jointly carried objects too weighty for a single robot to handle.
Source: IST Results
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg have visualised vibration and rotation in the nuclei of a hydrogen molecule as a quantum mechanical wave packet. What is more, this has been achieved on an extremely short spatio-temporal scale. They "photographed" the molecule using intensive, ultrashort laser pulses at different points in time and compiled a film from the separate images. This allowed them to visualise the quantum mechanical wave pattern of the vibrating and rotating molecule (Physical Review Letters, Online-Edition, November 6, 2006).
John Verkade remembers just how it happened some 40 years ago: One of his Iowa State University graduate students, David Hendricker, stopped by to report somebody was stealing a little wooden applicator stick from a beaker.
Oh, Verkade said, that's just a prank. Go hide around the corner and do some peeking until the joker shows up again. Thirty minutes later Hendricker was back in Verkade's office.
The Cybermedia Center (CMC) at Osaka University has purchased 20 SX-8R vector supercomputers from the NEC Corporation. The new system has a peak performance of 5.3 TFLOPS and will be the largest SX series system acquired in Japan.
CMC plans to add a next-generation SX system in two years, whose peak performance is expected to exceed 20 TFLOPS (one trillion floating-point operations per second), a performance enhancement of 16 times that of the current system of SX-5/12M8 (peak performance: 1,280GFLOPS).
Geoscience measuring networks have gaps, for where there is no electricity, no data can be collected. Many remote regions are still white spots on the data landscape. A new energy system will soon remedy the problem.
Weather forecasts, disaster warnings, traffic reports – no-one today is willing to go without up-to-the-minute information. Residents want to find out how high a flood will rise, scientists track the development of earthquakes, and investors call for wind data from the site of a projected wind farm. All of these data can only be determined if a close-meshed network of automatically operating measuring stations is in place. But the network is patchy, for in many places there is no power to operate the equipment. In places where no power cables have been laid, the measuring stations have to operate self-sufficiently. At present, the necessary electricity usually comes from solar cells, but these are not always able to meet the energy requirements. Especially in winter, when the modules are covered with snow and ice and additional energy is needed to heat the sensors, the sun’s energy is not sufficient. Sometimes it is simply too expensive to generate electricity using photovoltaics alone.