The end course project

Starting up:

Participants: Johan & Jakob

Date: 24/11-2010

Duration: 4 Hours

Goal: Determine which project will be made for the end course project, describe that and two alternatives.

Plan: Discuss and agree upon three overarching themes for projects, then brainstorm within each area.

Consider the possibilities and problem areas within each project and describe them according to NXT programming excercise 11.

The three themes

We decided upon choosing between a predator/prey system inspired by [1], a set of music robots inspired in part by The Trons [2] and some sort of scenario involving sexrobots and the exchange of genes, inspired by [3].


Music bots:
A flock of robots synchronized in such a way that they can agree on a global time, tempo or beat and act accordingly. This encompasses that an external observer should get the sense that the robots are aware of each other and playing music together. 


Sex bots:
A flock of robots that when they meet exchange genomes representing different behaviours or parts of behaviours.
Whether they exchange parts of behaviour or complete patterns would be determined at a later point.

Music Robots:
As describe above the robots need to agree on a global clock, disregarding order of activation and time of activation. Different methodologies have been aired as to how we could go about this. Using the microphone seemed the most difficult as we would then need to detect beats. Different time synchronization algorithms for distributed systems exists and one of these could be employed after having established the NXTs in a network over bluetooth. We have also discussed having a central NXT dictate the beat and use motor output wired via the converters to the sensor ports of the performing robots.


Hardware needed:
A bunch of NXT's possibly with microphones for synchronizing, if this approach is chosen. Convertercables between NXTs and RCXs might also be needed.

Softwareplatform:

Each NXT must have the same base software component developed in LeJOS, there might also need to be developed a seperate central controller for tempo dictating purposes should that approach be chosen.

Expected Difficulties:

There are several challenges in this project, the first being the part of actually  getting them synchronized on a level where the fine tuned human ear does not get annoyed at the system being a bit out of sync. Furthermore the challenge of dynamically adding or removing robots from of the system without disrupting the state of the system might not be a trivial task.

The system might also employ some sort of leader election algorithm to determine which robot is allowed to play a solo. 

On another level the purely artistic value of the system is going to be extremely challenging to bring forth.

Possible presentation:
At the end course presentation the robots sould be able to perform a piece of rythmic music, after being started seperately and deciding on a common beat. 
Possibly this could include internal communication to determine a soloist and so on.




Sex bots
The overarching theme in this project is to observe emergent behaviour in a flock of robots that exchange different behaviour genomes. A bunch of robots wander around on a map of some sort and each time they bump into each other they exchange part of their genome with the other robot.


Hardware requirements:
A bunch of NXTs with sensors enabling navigation and a bunch of motors, enable movement on the field.


Softwareplatform:
Each NXT needs to have a common framework, that controls the robot.
This framework can then contain an assortment of different genomes all implementing the same "genome" interface.
This way each robot can exchange genomes and use them very similar to behaviourbased architectures.


Expected difficulties:
One of the great challenges in this project is to express the behaviour of the individual robots in such a way that it is obvious when the different genomes are switched around. Also defining meaningful genomes and the whole exchange protocol could pose difficult.


Possible Presentation:
If all ends well, the flock of robots will at the end of the project be able to exchange behaviours in a way that manifests itself clearly in the environment.
Then it would be interesting to test out different algorithms for genome exchange as well as framework function and how this influences any convergence on specific behaviours if those are experienced.


Predator/Prey:
The general idea of this project is to have robots of two different kinds, predators and prey. Within this system there would be different conditions that resulted in death - hunger, age and so on. When a robot is dead there would need to be different conditions in which they can revived to create a more persistent world. Within this system we would like to have the robots seem like they're acting in a flock, even though they're all having individual behaviour patterns.


Hardware requirements:
A bunch of NXTs along with sensors and actuators from the standard kit.


Software requirements:
Two different controllers one for predators and one for prey. There might also be a need for a central controller operating the environment.


Other requirements:
A mat or other material representing the environment, this might actually take quite some time to fabricate as we need to create representations of safezones, foodzones, and homes. And in such a way that the robots are able to navigate it.


Expected difficulties:
The hardest part of this project is probably going to be creation behavioural patterns that are easy for the audience to interpret. Other than that navigating the environment in a meaningful way might also pose a challenge.

References:

1. http://www.imm.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/imm/cse%20laboratories/wurtz.pdf  - project from iMars lab
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2JChnwv2Ws - The Trons
3. http://hackaday.com/2005/03/25/sex-bots/ - Sex bots