The swarm of 100 scoutbots guarding every inch of the map

If you have ever seen a swarm of bees, you will have noticed that all its members move in unison, in a harmonious way, as if they were a single thinking being. The timing is perfect, which also gives a certain respect and even fear. Robots can also swarm, or that's what swarm robotics claims. An example 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 DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States, is behind the project, 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 back then. It was about testing whether it was possible to organize such a number of autonomous explorer robots as if it were a swarm of bees. And that said plan could be implemented in a short period of time. The money for the project was provided by DARPA. About 2.2 million dollars. But those who made it possible were SRI International, Stanford University, the University of Washington and ActivMedia. The result, one hundred scout robots that moved synchronously and had to work to perform mapping, tracking and surveillance tasks. In January 2004 they did a final test and another more ambitious one, of 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 applied swarm robotics. Swarms are always attractive to watch. And even more so if they were robots that move across 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 the night sky over Shanghai to ring in the year 2020? But swarm robotics is a relatively young area of ​​robotics. Next we remember one of its first implementations.

Unity is strength, also in robotics

The brief entry on Centibots on Wikipedia explains that this project was born in 2003 to design a coordination system for a large number of robots following the dynamics of the swarm robotics. Dozens of scoutbots acting as one. The project arises from DARPA. It is the investigative agency of the United States Department of Defense and which, among other milestones to its credit, was responsible for ARPANET, the antecedent of what is today the Internet. But there is more. Thanks to DARPA, GPS, Boston Dynamics' dog robot and Siri, Apple's assistant, emerged. 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 for more than 75 years and whose acronym stands for Stanford Research Institute. Not surprisingly, Stanford University was also involved in the project. They also joined researchers from the University of Washington and the company ActivMedia Robotics, which is currently a division of the company Adept, 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 from 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 unknown 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... In short, the ultimate goal was to create swarms of robots for exploration tasks, surveillance or follow up. For civil or military use, indistinctly.

The Swarm of One Hundred Scoutbots

Centibots is, or was, made up of one hundred autonomous scoutbots. Of them, the vast majority are ActivMedia's AmigoBot model. And the rest, between four and six, according to sources, were Pioneer 2 AT models, also from ActivMedia. The swarm splits into two teams. The first, that of the Pioneers, surveys the area while generating and sharing a map using its built-in laser ranging technology. AmigoBots roaming robots then spread out over 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 are not dependent on a network to connect to, as they create their own network using SRI International's proprietary technology. That own network allows the robots to communicate with each other to work as a team, so that if one robot causes 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 SRI International's explanation on its official website, these roving robots “could be sent to areas that are not safe for humans (collapsed or earthquake-damaged buildings, chemical spills, burning buildings, structures occupied by terrorists). ) or to areas where humans can't see anything (smoky buildings) but where robot sensors can. Wherever they were deployed, the robots could make maps and search for people who needed to be rescued.

The legacy of the Centibots project

It is not easy to know what remains of Centibots today. In the literal sense. On the internet there remains the official page of the project on the SRI International website, a dedicated page at the University of Washington and the paper that was written after the end of the project. It is entitled Distributed Multirobot Exploration and Mapping and was published by the IEEE in 2006. The IEEE itself hosts it on its website, although to read and download it you have to register. As for the project participants, SRI International remains engaged in research related to robotics and artificial intelligence. For its part, ActivMedia changed names 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 a 2011 Muy Interesante interview, one of the project participants, Enrique Ruspini, explains why the project was born in 2003 and ended in 2004. It was not about developing a definitive roving robot system. The idea was rather "to demonstrate the feasibility of developing and implementing collaborative distributed architectures in a relatively short period of time." Making that botnet possible would come later.

The people behind Centibots weren't the first to do research with roving robots or mobile robots. Already in 1966, 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 what would come later a reality in a single year. in a matter of distributed robots. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, currently, 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 covered a Hong Kong warehouse that works 24/7. Its employees, autonomous robots that communicate with each other and learn from their work by improving their protocols thanks to artificial intelligence. And companies like Nike or Decathlon already use them in their stores. According to the Chinese company Geek+, there are more than 15,000 robots of this type in the world, operating in more than 30 countries. This is, in part, the legacy of Centibots.