LumiBots: making emergence graspable in a swarm of robots

  • Authors:

  • Mey Lean Kronemann;Verena V. Hafner

  • Affiliations:

  • Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam, Germany;Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

  • StiCo in action

    Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems

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Abstract

Emergence is a concept that is not easy to grasp, since it contradicts our idea of central control and planning. In this work, we use a swarm of robots as a tangible tool to visualize interactions as the underlying principle of emergence. We utilize phosphorescent sheet (i.e. glow-in-the-dark foil) that can be activated with UV LEDs to visualize local information transfer between the robots in form of fading luminescent trails. The robots are specially designed to be both easy-to-understand and easy-to-build. They are a low-cost kit that can allow non-professionals to explore collective behaviour. By playing with the robots, they can get an understanding of complex systems such as emergence or Ant Colony Optimization algorithms in an automatic and playful way.