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Icosystem Corporation has been awarded a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to apply principles of swarm intelligence to the control of robotic swarms. The project, titled "Design of Control Strategies for Swarms of Unmanned Ground Vehicles," proposes to develop strategies to control swarms of robots carrying out indoor navigation and reconnaissance tasks. The underlying research goal of this project is to address a number of fundamental questions about swarm control. "Recent technological advances in robotics, coupled with the decreasing cost of robotic platforms, makes the deployment of large robot teams a near-term possibility. However, there is little research that can help us understand how to control a team of robots in a way that is efficient and effective" said Paolo Gaudiano, Icosystem's VP of Technology and co-Principal Investigator on this project. "We will be addressing some fundamental questions about control strategies for robotic swarms. But more importantly, we will develop performance metrics that will make it possible to evaluate if and when it makes sense to use robotic swarms, and which control strategies are best suited to solve specific problems." "This is a great opportunity to apply Icosystem's world-class expertise in swarm intelligence to real-world problems with immediate, practical applications" said Eric Bonabeau, Icosystem's founder and Chief Scientific Officer, co-PI on this project. "Robotic swarms could be immensely helpful for a variety of tasks, especially for operations in hazardous or inhospitable environments. For example, robot teams could be used in search-and-rescue missions of the type that was needed for the World Trade Center, or they could be applied in space, where modular, distributed robots can be deployed to build structures and perform maintenance on the space station and other platforms." Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DARPA or the Department of Interior-National Business Center (DOI-NBC). About Icosystem Corporation Icosystem Corporation, a strategy consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has emerged as a leader in the development of business applications for network theory and complexity science. Using the tools of complexity science and advanced computational techniques, Icosystem provides a highly flexible and cost-effective technology platform for exploring business problems and discovering or designing strategies that have significant impact. Icosystem's approach uses realistic models of complex business environments and evolutionary and distributed computational techniques to validate new business ventures or improve the performance of existing enterprises. |
