Hive Bots
From Code Lab Wiki
Now that robot servants such as the roomba have finally arrived to populate our houses, we are looking at taking the next step: our houses themselves could be made of a large number of simple robots, a sort of swarm of bricks. Participants join a swarm and coordinate by following rule cards to construct a hive out of cardboard building block cells.
Different hive structures are defined by different rulesets. Each hive-builder gets a rule card from the current ruleset that says where to place bloxes cells. Each rulecard has a picture of the local structure where a new cell should be added. When a cell is added, the local structure is changed, potentially triggering other rules. These rulesets are based on Theraulaz and Bonabeau's research on wasp nest-building.
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[edit] Start Your Own Hive
The following flyers have rule cards and seed configurations so that you can play with Hive Bots at home. You can play with small plastic omnifix cubes (buy them here or [ here]) or with huge cardboard bloxes (buy them [ here]).
[edit] Simulator
To develop rulesets we used the 3D wasp nest simulator written by Sylvain Guerin and used by Theraulaz and Bonabeau in their research. The source code (with patches to compile with recent versions of gcc) is here: [1].
[edit] Researchers
Ellen Yi-Luen Do
[edit] Hive Bots Workshops
We have held several workshops for elementary and middle school students over the summer of 2009 at the Carnegie Science Center as a part of their RoboWorld exhibit and summer camp program.
[edit] Hive-building Sessions
The first hive-building session was held as a part of robot 250 at the mattress factory on July 20, 2008.
[edit] Papers
2009
- M P Weller and E Y-L Do (2009): Exploring Architectural Robotics with the Human Hive, in Proceedings of Creativity and Cognition (C&C 2009), ACM. (to appear). pdf
[edit] Videos
Hivebots group at the Carnegie Science Center.
