Tiny herd robots: the first colonists on Mars?

The European I-SWARM project succeeded in creating a flock of one hundred centimeter-sized robots, capable of communicating with each other. Will these be the first workers on Mars?

Now that water has been discovered on Mars, people around the world are starting to think and wonder how the distant planet can be settled as quickly as possible. The answer is probably that humans will not be the first settlers on Mars, but groups of tiny robots, capable of communicating with each other and working together to carry out tasks. The robots will be able to operate on solar energy, and will work similarly to ants, which are able to cooperate to achieve complex goals such as collecting food/minerals and building nests/houses. And the best: the first generation of robots already exists in laboratories.

As part of the I-SWARM project, funded by the European Union, a research group from Germany created a hundred robots on the order of a centimeter, showing considerable progress towards the ability to build swarms of microbots the size of an ant. Some researchers have since moved on to work on creating swarms of robots that are able to rearrange themselves in space, connect with each other, and create larger robots to accomplish different goals.

Exploring and colonizing alien stars are only a small part of the inexhaustible possibilities that collaborative robots open up to us. Their extraordinary ability to redefine their roles according to the obstacle in front of them, makes them valuable also in search and rescue missions, working under the sea surface, repairing complex machines from the inside and treating air or water pollution. Visionaries also predict that a day will come when robots will be able to perform treatments inside the human body itself, but another vision for the time being.

Although all these ideas are still far from being realized, much like the idea of ​​colonizing Mars, the I-SWARM group has managed to make enough progress to create programmable ant-like robots. Just as ants receive messages from other ants in their environment and understand what they should do, so the new robots are able to communicate with each other and sense their surroundings. The result is a type of collective sensing, which relies on dozens of individual units that share with each other the impressions they perceive.

The robots use infrared for communication purposes, and each of them signals to the robot next to them, until the entire herd has received the message. For example, when one robot encounters a barrier, it will signal the others to surround the barrier and help move it out of the way.

The group currently mainly uses two types of robots - one is called 'Yasmin', it moves on wheels and is about the size of a half shekel coin. The second and smallest is called the I-SWARM robot, and it is only three millimeters long. This robot moves using vibrations, and derives its power from a tiny solar motor, unlike Yasmin which is powered by a battery.

"Power is an important issue. The more complex the task, the more energy is required. A robot that needs to lift something uses powerful motors, and these require a lot of energy," says Mark Zymanski, a robotics researcher at Karlsruhe University in Germany and a member of the research group. He emphasizes that processing power is also an issue, as the tiny robots have minimal processing power. Each robot can contain only eight kilobytes of memory for programming purposes, and two kilobytes of RAM. For the sake of comparison, the researchers say that this is about one millionth of the capabilities of most PCs.

Tests proved that the infant robots were able to communicate with each other, although the project members were unable to achieve their initial goal of producing a thousand of the robots. If they were successful, it would be the largest group of tiny autonomous robots ever created in the world. Despite the temporary setback, Zimanski is convinced that the group is close to succeeding in mass production of the robots, which can be produced similarly to computer chips that are printed on flexible circuit boards and folded into their final shape. According to him, it is simply "a type of miniature origami."

When the day comes and the mass production of the robots will allow their penetration into the market, then the first spacecraft to reach Mars will surely carry several thousand such robots, which will be able to perform complex tasks without fear of significant damage. And even if one robot breaks down - oh well, there are thousands of others behind it. The sailors in their imaginations will also imagine robots that can build new robots in their image and take care of their survival on the planet, but for this you need to continue to follow the developments in the European I-SWARM project.

For information on the European Union website

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• A contest to compose the first sentence uttered by the first astronaut to land on Mars
• to Mars in two weeks
• NASA's big plan to land a man on Mars