

One use of internal what-if modeling is the “ethical” robot of Winfield et al.


The utility of this ability depends on the speed of simulation clearly the higher the speed, the more possibilities can be tested. Giving a robot the ability to answer what-if questions could allow a robot to evaluate courses of action or strategies in the safety of simulation, rather than in the real world where they may have potentially catastrophic consequences. Moving computational power into the swarm would allow us to combine these approaches, the speed of evolution within simulated environments together with the adaptability of continuous reality testing. Usually, the low-processing power of the individual robots precludes using simulation within the robots as a means of accelerating the evolutionary process. Embodied evolutionary swarm robotics moves evolution into the swarm and directly tests controllers, avoiding the reality gap and making the swarm scalable and adaptive to the environment (Watson et al., 2002). However, this often results in lower performance due to the reality gap (Jakobi et al., 1995). One common and successful approach is the use of evolutionary techniques to discover suitable controller solutions in simulated environments and the transfer of these controllers to real robots. A fundamental problem of the field is the automatic design of controllers for robot swarms such that a desired collective behavior emerges (Francesca and Birattari, 2016). These swarms have the potential to be inherently robust, decentralized, and scalable.

Swarm robotics (Sahin, 2005) originally takes inspiration from collective phenomena in nature, including social insects, flocks of birds, and schools of fish to create collective behaviors that emerge from local interactions between robots and their environment. There are several research areas that particularly motivate the design. The Xpuck swarm is a new research platform with an aggregate raw processing power in excess of two teraflops, which enables new experiments that require high-individual robot computation and large numbers of robots.
#Hot wheels velocity x pc corruptions simulator
We demonstrate the computational capability of the swarm by implementing a fast physics-based robot simulator and using this within a distributed island model evolutionary system, all hosted on the Xpucks. The teraflop swarm could also be used to explore swarming in nature by providing platforms with similar computational power as simple insects. Uses include online evolution or learning of swarm controllers, simulation for answering what-if questions about possible actions, distributed super-computing for mobile platforms, and real-world applications of swarm robotics that requires image processing, or SLAM. The platform enables new experiments that require high individual robot computation and multiple robots. The augmented robots, called Xpucks, have at least an order of magnitude greater performance than previous swarm robotics platforms. The swarm uses 16 e-puck robots augmented with custom hardware that uses the substantial CPU and GPU processing power available from modern mobile system-on-chip devices. We introduce the Xpuck swarm, a research platform with an aggregate raw processing power in excess of two teraflops.
