Intelligent Small World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation (I-Swarm) is a Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an research project to develop millimeter-scale robots for dangerous activities. It is coordinated by Jörg Seyfried at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. The robots operate on solar power

Solar power

Solar energy, radiant light and heat from the sun, has been harnessed by humans since ancient times using a range of ever-evolving technologies. Solar radiation, along with secondary solar-powered resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass, account for most of the available...

 and can communicate between each other.

Aims

The I-Swarm project aims to develop and produce a large scale swarm

Swarm

Swarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by animals of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving en masse or migrating in some direction. As a term, swarming is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to...

 (up to 1,000) of microrobots

Microbotics

Microbotics is the field of miniature robotics, in particular mobile robots with characteristic dimensions less than 1 mm...

.

Robots

The robots' proposed size is 2 x 2 x 1 mm. This small size means that sensory

Sensory

Sensory may refer to:relating to senses or smellIn biology:* Sensory preference* Sensory system, part of the nervous system of organisms* Sensory neuron, nerve cell responsible for transmitting information about external stimuli...

 and computational capabilities will be limited. This is to be compensated for by collective behavior

Collective behavior

The expression collective behaviour was first used by Robert E. Park, and employed definitively by Herbert Blumer, to refer to social processes and events which do not reflect existing social structure , but which emerge in a "spontaneous" way.Collective behavior might also be defined as action...

 and emerging swarm effects

Swarm intelligence

Swarm intelligence is the collective behaviour of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence...

.
The robots will differ in the type of sensors, manipulators and the amount of computational power.

Activities

The robot swarm is expected to have a variety of applications, including micro assembly, biological, medical or cleaning tasks.

External links

• I-Swarm home page