Beetle robot society

With the Beetle mimicking a simple insect or animal system of input and responses to input, we were interested in making the one simple single system more complicated. We were interested to make many of these interacting with each other. Would they play bumper cars with each other? Or would they get caught in eachother’s horns and bundle up in the center or a corner where they couldn’t move. This would be a simple social experiment of a society that we created, but can not necessarily predict the outcome.

This form of distributed intelligence would an adaptation of the simple game of life. Life (designed by --- in in the nineteen seventies) is a simple game of interacting, and reproducing cells. This a simple system of motion and interacting. The cells react depending on how many other cells are around them. To many cells or units to close together in the system will not all survive because of starvation. Too few will die of loneliness or lack of survival skills being alone since these simple one cell organisms mush be pack animals. If there is just the right density of population in an area then the cells get it on, reproduction takes place, and they miracle we call life is formed. These are the extreamly simple rules of the game of life, to an extent the beetle robots follow very simple rules as well. Every interval of time they move a distance forward. If something bumps their right censor, their left motor reverses direction. If something bumps their Left censor then their right motor reverses direction causeing them to spin the other way. In addition to this, they follow the simple physical rules of this universe.

Even though these rules seem predicable enough, obviously the system would never be that simple. They would immediately clash and become tangles because the laws of the physical world are infinitely more complicated then the small amount of binary digits that the cells on the game of life are defined as.

This would have been an ideal project for the 3rd project, they system of motion project. I am very curious not wether or not they would get caught, but wether or not they could free themselves. Would they get caught with no traction with their motors just franticly spinning away not able to move them in the direction that they are spinning, or will the chaos of there being so many of them be able to dislodge them, and let they free to scurry about their pen. Or would it be possible for them to eventually reach a stopping pattern or static position… this is completely possible with many Games of Life systems. They often reach a holding pattern, or a static look that they will never have a reaction to. This could happen in the first couple seconds of motion, or the beetles could suddenly reach this after a couple hours. The beetles could reach that static position years from now when their theoretical battery life had long since run out…

This project, while very interesting is not practical with the current restraints of time and money. I would still like to attempt this with Bob King at some point in the next year and a half that I will still be attending NC School of the Arts. I think this would be an interesting insalation piece for the hall, or the classroom. An idea to let these run their course somehow would be to make them somehow rechargeable, perhaps by adding solar receptors on their backs that would recharge them during the day, or under an artificial light source. This would have the added bonus of making them very environmentally friendly, and making them very green.

Beetle robot society, also known as:
beetle robot culture
beetle robot societal construct!