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The Sound of Science - 'Human swarm robotics'

NIU STEAM
NIU STEAM

The Sound of Science - 'Human swarm robotics'

Jeremy - This is Jeremy Benson from NIU STEAM and we're back with The Sound of Science. Today, we have our third episode with Dr. Sachit Butail from NIU, who's going to be talking about agent-based modeling. Today we're going to talk specifically about how agent-based modeling and robotics can work together to create some interesting opportunities. Welcome back Dr. Butail.

Dr. Butail - Thank you Jeremy.

Jeremy – So, tell us what is human swarm robotics?

Dr. Butail – So, robots are ideally suited for doing tasks that are tedious and repetitive. For example: monitoring the Great Lakes for invasive species, or searching for a missing target in a large park. What a single robot can do, many robots, or a swarm of robots can theoretically do better and faster-- however, the system now becomes deviously more complex. Humans are great at searching because they possess prior knowledge about the environment, and perhaps even the target. So, human swarm robotics combines the two and asks the question, ‘How can a swarm of robots interact with humans to efficiently monitor a large environment?’ Because it is difficult to realize a large swarm of robots and humans together, we often use agent-based models in our lab to recreate these realistic situations and test different interaction strategies between humans and robots.

Jeremy – So, what type of new and exciting opportunities does human swarm robotics create for us?

Dr. Butail - The human swarm robotics creates new opportunities for humans and robots to work together to achieve unprecedented goals. One example of this is citizen size initiatives, where one can visualize humans working together through a large fleet of robots to monitor lakes, oceans and even extra-terrestrial planets.

Jeremy – Well, thank you so much for joining us for these last few episodes. And thank you all for listening. Please come back and join us next time on The Sound of Science on WNIJ- where you learn something new every day.

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