‘Swarmathon’ Robotics Team Competes at Cape Canaveral – UC Merced University News

The future of robotics is not in using one super-powerful robot for all tasks, but rather to use a coalition of simpler robots collaboratively, Carpinexplained.

Todays engineers, drawing inspiration from nature, design cooperative robots to accomplish tasks impossible for individualrobots.

A lot of the ideas implemented in robots are inspired by biological algorithms, Meraz explained. How do ants forage for food? And how do you translate those foraging algorithms torobots?

But why ants? Ant societies exhibit efficient group problem solving. A kind of higher intelligence, absent in solitary ants, emerges from the swarm. Some biologists even refer to ant societies assuperorganisms.

Essentially, you can look at the swarm as a single organism with distributed sensors that are all communicating with each other, Merazexplained.

This is what NASA wants from Swarmies cooperative rovers that mimic the efficient foraging behavior of antswarms.

With this in mind, UC Merceds team comprised of Meraz, Jose Manuel Gonzalez Hermosillo, Jesus Sergio Gonzalez Castellon, Navvaran Mann, James Nho, Jesus Salcedo and Carlos Diaz developed code to turn their trio of Swarmies into a tiny colony of roboticants.

But this was no easy task. Nor was it their only obligation. NASA also requires Swarmathon teams to engage inoutreach.

The team worked with students from Atwaters Buhach Colony High School to build SumoBots. As the name suggests, SumoBots are robots designed to push each other around, the winner being the SumoBot that forces its opponent out of thering.

But for many involved, the highlight of the year was the Swarmathon itself. Six team members traveled to NASAs Kennedy Space Center to compete. This was the first year UC Merced participated in the 2-year-oldevent.

Pitted against 18 other teams, UC Merced came in 11thoverall.

We spent a lot of time on this, and it was really hard, Meraz said What we thought wed progress to and what we did progress to were verydifferent.

However, the team did not come away empty-handed. They won second prize for their technical report describing the methods, experiments and results of their efforts. They also won third prize for their outreach report, which documented their work at BuhachColony.

Plus, Swarmathon helped two team members secure coveted summer internships. Meraz was invited to spend the summer in the lab of Melanie Moses, the UNM robotics professor who oversees Swarmathon, while Diaz and Gonzalez will stay on campus to work in Carpins lab on a project funded byUSDA/NIFA.

And Meraz and company have no plans to quitnow.

We are definitely competing again next year, Meraz said. I've already recruited a few of the top students that were in my Intro to Robotics course with Stefano Carpin, so we will go in with much moreexperience.

Original post:

'Swarmathon' Robotics Team Competes at Cape Canaveral - UC Merced University News