Human Hive

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hive built from the tower ruleset at the mattress factory
hive built from the tower ruleset at the mattress factory

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.

some rules from the tower ruleset
some rules from the tower ruleset

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.

Contents

[edit] Simulator

screenshot of 3D wasp nest simulator
screenshot of 3D wasp nest 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

Michael Philetus Weller

Mark D Gross

Eric Schweikardt

Ellen Yi-Luen Do

Cheng Xu

[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.

tower ruleset pdf

flickr photoset

[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.

Hive built with tower ruleset at Robot 250 workshop.

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