A recent interactive workshop conducted by Professor James McLurkin of MIT showed how bees and ants’ instincts to swarm in large groups was inspiration enough to create multi-robot systems, says aparajita sen

FRIDAY afternoon was a treat for science enthusiasts in Kolkata as professor James McLurkin, Massachusetts Institute of technology, alumni member, conducted a workshop/presentation with a live robot demonstration in Birla Industrial and Technological Museum. The event, co-hosted by the US Consulate along with BITM, attracted school and college students from reputed institutions like The Future Foundation School, Apeejay School, Modern High School, Birla High School, Delhi Public School (New Town) and Maulana Azad College.
McLurkin built up the workshop from an introduction on robotic mechanisms with illustrations of popular examples like the Roomba, Honda Asimo and iBot PackBot to more complicated concepts of distributed algorithms in multi-robot systems. Familiar references like the Roomba, as seen in the popular television show Breaking Bad, assured the audience that McLurkin knew what he was talking about.
The audience, which primarily comprised school students and lay people, had no trouble following the professor&’s explanations, as he smoothly broke everything down to basics. Not only did they understand and absorb McLurkin&’s lecture, he succeeded in involving them sufficiently for school students to come up with profound queries as well as answers regarding the topic in discussion. He envisioned using large populations of robots to solve a variety of practical problems ranging from earthquake rescue and warehouse assistance to mapping buildings, Mars exploration and security patrolling. Such solutions promise to be faster, cheaper and far more efficient than human labour. Though McLurkin&’s vision is revolutionary, it is obstructed from becoming a reality in the near future given the fact that it will be an expensive affair. As a solution to this, he has come up with the r-one robot, an advanced low-cost design suitable for research, education and outreach. Like a lot of modern day scientific innovation, the concept of swarm robots is modelled on nature.
The behaviour of swarming, which has normally been seen in ants, termites, bees and wasps for millions of years and observed by biologists has distinct characteristics and mechanisms, has proved to be extremely efficient in accomplishing various collective tasks. A common instance of this behaviour may be observed in the way honeybees collect nectar. It was noted that nature teaches us how complex group behaviour is exhibited by simple systems in large populations.
Professor McLurkin attempted to simulate similar behaviour in his robots. Drawing examples from his experiences working at Rice University Multi-Robot Systems Lab, McLurkin elaborately discussed and explained the opportunities and challenges presented by swarm robots. He showed an overview of his team&’s work with multi-robot systems, including distributed algorithms for robot recovery, angular coordinating system and massive manipulation. McLurkin&’s research focuses on developing distributed algorithms for multi-robot systems, which is software that uses local communications between simple robots to produce large-scale complex group behaviour. Through this process, the robots communicating via infrared light signals will be able to form a straight line or a triangle without them even realising it. The robots’ actions are based on unique robot identifications that will be programmed into each robot at the time of manufacture. McLurkin explained navigation problems and the use of sensors in robots to measure the geometry of their network. One school student raised a question worth noting – how are swarm robots so special and different from significantly cheaper remote-controlled toy cars?
The answer lies in the fact that the cars in question have very limited sensors. Thus they have no clue where they are going and need to be closely monitored. Inspired students were advised by the professor to learn programming languages like Python for a start, moving on to more complex ones like C and Java. McLurkin built his own first robot in 1988 and today his research group has one of the largest collections of robots in the world with over 200 different robots at last count. He credited LEGO bricks, his ant farm, common video games like Pacman and radio-controlled cars for contributing to his understanding of robotics.
McLurkin was full of engaging stories from his life and work, which were simultaneously amusing and instructive. The event proved a brilliant success, with the eloquent professor involving the audience in activities and interactive rounds leaving all present in awe of the subject and the possibilities it offers. McLurkin wrapped up with a grounding quote that warned against divorcing life from play in the pursuit of work.
McLurkin, considered a pioneer of swarm robotics, is an assistant professor in Rice University&’s department of Computer Science, holds degrees in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science and is the recipient of multiple awards and honours. He was recognised by Time magazine as one of America&’s top-five engineers and was here in Kolkata as part of a visit to the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.