Termite robots implement the project without centralized coordination

A group of young scientists, specifically two charming girls and one young man from the Visa Institute *, working with Harvard, created mini-robots repeating the complex behavior of termites in the construction of termite mounds. Proceed from the following assumptions:

• the buildings are quite complicated
• each participant in the process does not have a developed intellect
• the whole project has no generalized coordination

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As part of the study, a self-organizing robotic system was modeled in which the behavior of each robot fits into the simplest set of conditions and is coordinated with the actions of other participants in the process. The project is self-regulated on the basis of the “here and now” principle due to the mutual adjustment of participants in the process within the framework of certain rules of conduct. In short, the robots themselves "decide" which block to put.



* At once I will make a reservation that in the Russian media a research institute is mistakenly called the “Weiss Institute” - this confusion in pronunciation is clarified on the website of the institute itself .

Vimeo: video of the experiment.

The results of any successful scientific experiment can be of practical importance even for areas that are not formally related to the subject of research. Recall that the Visa Institute develops materials for medicine based on the technological copying of functions and production processes of living organisms. Nevertheless, a model of a self-organizing system that performs a complex project without drawings may be of direct interest to specialists in the field of project management.

It remains only to wait for what conclusions the project management theorists will make from this experiment - will it result in the emergence of a new one or a review of current methodologies? How much is it possible to use the resource of self-organization when organizing teams?

In any case, the results of this experiment will be useful to familiarize managers, confident that without their intervention, the development team will fall into uncontrolled entropy. Of course, the project manager is an important figure, however, it is likely that a methodology can be developed where this role will be performed by the “collective mind” based on a certain set of “game rules” in the current situation. I think it is not difficult to guess which of the currently existing methodologies is the most similar - and to draw the appropriate conclusions.

References:
The main theme of the journal Science - the link you can find additional materials and videos.
Science Journal: Report, February 14, 2014
Article on the BBC website , February 13, 2014
Journal Elements: publication in ru-nete

More on this topic:
Habrahabr.ru - Flying robots are building a tower , January 14, 2012
Wikipedia - Group Robotics
Biomimetics (translation of an article on the site Inosmi)
Self-organization to work on projects: development in the company Valve

Reference:

Where: The Visa Institute at Harvard University. The research institute creates “technologies inspired by nature” (Biologically Inspired Engineering) for implementation in the field of medicine.
Who: Justin Werfel , Kirstin Petersen , Radhika Nagpal (All three are PhD in Computer Science, i.e. Ph.D., computer science)