If you have ever seen a swarm of bees you will have noticed that all its members move in unison, harmoniously, as if they were a single thinking being. The timing is perfect, which also gives a certain respect and even fear. Robots can also organize in swarms , or that is what swarm robotics intends. An exponent of this coordination system is the Centibots project, a name that seems to be taken from a children's series from the 90s but which defines what it is: a swarm of one hundred robots . Explorer robots. And if I tell you that behind the project is DARPA , the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, this swarm of robots is much scarier than a swarm of bees.
Jokes aside, Centibots is a project that emerged in 2003 to put into practice the knowledge of robotics of that time. The aim was to test whether it was possible to organize such a number of autonomous rover robots as if it were a swarm of bees. And that said plan could be implemented in a short period of time. The project money was paid by DARPA . About $ 2.2 million. But those who made it possible were SRI International , Stanford University , University of Washington and ActivMedia . The result, one hundred exploration robots that moved in a synchronized way and that had to work to carry out mapping, tracking and surveillance tasks . In January 2004 they did a final test and a more ambitious one, lasting 24 hours, at the end of the same year. And the results were more than satisfactory.
In recent years we have seen spectacular examples of swarm robotics applied. Swarms are always attractive to watch. And more if they were robots that move over huge surfaces or that fly as if they were dancing in the air. Amazon surprised everyone in 2014 with its autonomous robots that transport packages in automated warehouses. At the end of 2019, some of its facilities housed a whopping 200,000 robots . And what about the 2,000 drones that lit up Shanghai's night sky to ring in the year 2020. But swarm robotics is a relatively young area of robotics. Here we recall one of its first implementations.
Source : SRI International
Unity is strength, also in robotics
The brief entry on Centibots in Wikipedia explains that this project was born in 2003 to design a coordination system for a large number of robots following the dynamics of swarm robotics. Dozens of robot scouts acting as one. The project arises from DARPA . It is the investigation agency of the United States Department of Defense and, among other milestones to its credit, it was responsible for ARPANET , the antecedent to what is now the internet. But there is more. Thanks to DARPA came GPS, the Boston Dynamics dog robot or Siri, Apple's assistant. But that is another story.
With a budget of 2.2 million US dollars, DARPA assigned the project to SRI International , a research institute that has collaborated with the United States government since more than 75 years ago and whose acronym stands for Stanford Research Institute . It is not surprising that the Stanford University also participated in the project. Researchers from the University of Washington and the company ActivMedia Robotics also joined, which is currently a division of the Adept company, hence its current name Adept MobileRobots . From ActivMedia, created in 1995, we can highlight its participation in other projects such as the AmigoBot.
The purpose of the Centibots project was “to develop a new technology that allows the coordinated deployment of up to 100 robots for missions such as urban surveillance.” This is explained by a page of SRI International itself, hosted in its artificial intelligence division. “The objective of this project is to advance the state of the art of distributed robotics.” Distributed robotics, also known as swarm robotics. The idea is to combine an undetermined number of explorer robots that can operate in a coordinated and autonomous way in tasks such as planning trajectories, identifying places and objects, exploring areas … Ultimately, the ultimate goal was create swarms of robots for exploration, surveillance or monitoring tasks. For civil or military use, indistinctly.
Source : SRI International
The swarm of one hundred explorer robots
Centibots is made up, or was made up, of one hundred autonomous rover robots. Of them, the vast majority are models AmigoBot from ActivMedia . And the rest, between four and six, according to the sources, were models Pioneer 2 AT , also of ActivMedia . The swarm is divided into two teams. The first, the Pioneer, surveys the area while generating and sharing a map using its built-in laser telemetry technology. Next, the AmigoBots robot explorers spread around the mapped area to search for objects, detect or track intruders, and share information. These robots incorporate ultrasound sensors and a camera to detect objects.
The particularity of this swarm, which acts in two waves, is that the robots are autonomous and independent . They do not depend on a network to connect to, as they create their own network using proprietary technology from SRI International . This own network allows the robots to communicate with each other to work as a team, so that if one robot gives problems, the rest replace it. The information and data generated are sent to a control center.
Among the details that were taken into account to carry out the Centibots project, the decision to create robots designed to be simple and cheap stands out. And that once working in a swarm, they managed to enhance and improve their characteristics separately. For example, going back to the explanation of SRI International on its official website, these robot explorers “could be sent to areas that are not safe for humans ( buildings collapsed or damaged by earthquakes, chemical spills, burning buildings, structures occupied by terrorists) or to areas where humans cannot see anything (buildings filled with smoke) but where robot sensors can. Wherever they were deployed, robots could map and search for people who needed to be rescued. ”
Source : SRI International
The legacy of the Centibots project
It is not easy to know what is left of Centibots today. In the literal sense. On the internet there is the official page of the project on the website of SRI International , a dedicated page at the University of Washington and the paper that was written after the end of the project. It is titled Distributed Multirobot Exploration and Mapping and was published by the IEEE in 2006. The IEEE itself hosts it on its website, although you must register to read and download it. Regarding the project participants, SRI International remains dedicated to research related to robotics and artificial intelligence. For its part, ActivMedia changed its name and owners on several occasions.
The purpose of the project was to obtain knowledge, hardware and software for future projects related to distributed robotics or swarm robotics. In an interview with Muy Interesante from 2011, one of the participants in the project, Enrique Ruspini , explains why the project was born in 2003 and ended in 2004. It was not about developing a system of Ultimate robot scouts. The idea was rather “ to demonstrate the feasibility of developing and implementing collaborative distributed architectures in a relatively short period of time”. Making this network of robots possible would come later.
Those responsible for Centibots were not the first to investigate with rover robots or mobile robots. Already in 1966, the SRI itself had created Shakey the robot, the first mobile robot, the grandfather of the models with which they worked in 2003 and 2004. What this project did achieve was to make reality in a single year what would come later in terms of distributed robots . As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, today companies like Amazon already operate with hundreds of thousands of autonomous robots that organize themselves for tasks such as package management and organization. But it is not the only one.
This summer, CNN was reporting on a Hong Kong warehouse that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Its employees, autonomous robots that communicate with each other and that learn from their work by improving their protocols thanks to artificial intelligence . And companies like Nike or Decathlon already use them in their warehouses. According to the Chinese company Geek + , in the world there are more than 15,000 robots of this type that operate in more than 30 countries. This is, in part, the legacy of Centibots .
