Intelligent Small World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation

Intelligent Small World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation (I-Swarm) is a European research project to develop millimeter-scale robots for dangerous activities. It is coordinated by Jörg Seyfried at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. The robots operate on solar power and can communicate between each other.

Aims

The I-Swarm project aims to develop and produce a large scale swarm (up to 1,000 [ISWARM, University of Karlsruhe, Research and Innovation in Baden-Württemberg http://www.wissenschaftwirtschaft-bw.de/index.php4?topic=universitaet&uni_id=6&profile_id=28] ) of microrobots [IPR Publications, 2004, Abstract http://wwwipr.ira.uka.de/en/Publications/detailed_publication.htm?id=1095254176] .

Robots

The robots' proposed size is 2 x 2 x 1 mm. This small size means that sensory and computational capabilities will be limited. This is to be compensated for by collective behavior and emerging swarm effects [IPR Publications, 2004, Abstract http://wwwipr.ira.uka.de/en/Publications/detailed_publication.htm?id=1095254176] .The robots will differ in the type of sensors, manipulators and the amount of computational power. [COGNIRON Links, I-SWARM, http://www.cogniron.org/Links.php ]

Activities

The robot swarm is expected to have a variety of applications, including micro assembly, biological, medical or cleaning tasks. [COGNIRON Links, I-SWARM, http://www.cogniron.org/Links.php ]

References

External links

* [http://i60p4.ira.uka.de/~seyfried/tikiwiki-1.7.3/tiki-index.php?page=I-Swarm I-Swarm home page]