Mini-Robots, Motherships, Swarm Strategies, Wasps, Ants, Organization and Delivery

Robots are for every one. Tech TV now host Battle Bots which is a big hit with viewers and draws crowds as big as WFB Wrestling. Many of these people get heavy into the Robot Scene and even occasionally try to impress Military People. Check out some of these Super Heavy Weight Battle Bots, every type of configuration available.

http://www.battlebots.com/superheavyweights.asp

What I find most interesting to these battle bot groups is that they are literally practicing warfare at a micro-level, using flanking maneuvers, military strategy, modern day theories, and theories of nature and hunting. Why are these groups important? Well for one we have seen them as we have seen those who play computer games such as Mech-Warrior and others become as smart at tactics as those being trained in military history strategy and tactics at West point.

When we discuss the use of swarms in battle, we often think of animals, bees, wasps, etc. I think of UAV swarms and taking this to another level these Battle Bots also have been messing around with such ideas, recreating science fiction movies genres and using some pretty interesting calculations and ideas to justify their ideas. We must consider both offense and defensive ideas on this theme. Now we are already on the scene with our DARPA to build swarm ability UAVs. UAV costs for military operations. AeroVironment WASP and the hobbyist; the Q-Butterfly. You might want to google both of those items to learn more.

Should we use the same defenses we use on insect swarms for possible defense on UAV swarms? Well here are some of the things we do to prevent swarms in insects: Killing of Q-Fly and uses of DDT can give us insight as to the level of problem West Nile really is, to eradicate it completely is a huge issue.

http://www.sardi.sa.gov.au/pages/entomolo/...fhistry_no3.pdf

http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiry/citrus/finalr...t/appendixe.pdf

We have had some success with the Mediterranean fruit fly. Here are some of the ground robots created for Battle Bot RoboWars.

http://victorynetwork.net/michael/downloads/notebook.ps

There are hundreds of people thinking about these things day and night all with ideas and trying to better each others efforts and this competition is helping the speed of evolution of this technology.

http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/archvC2.html

If you study African Fire ants working together when attacking a larger prey. If you think about it there are thousands of species probably 20,000 species, we have categorized about 10,000 so far. 20,000 species of ants and they are niche specialists and if you weigh them out, they weigh the same amount as the 6.6 Billion people in the world. Using an ant concept with an exo-skeleton you have the basic idea for a Mother Ship Robot, which carries smaller robots for important purposes. And really if you take an evasion craft of the Normandy Invasion and put in many Fighters with Kevlar and helmet, is that not the same concept?

http://www.michaelbehar.com/wired/robots_05_02_p2.html

Science Fictionists have forever been developers of such ideas, but in real life we must also deal with motion and therefore we have to make sure that these little robots as well as the mothership has the proper motor, gearing, batteries, speed controllers, fuel, weapons systems.

http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2001/minirobot.htm

We are not the only ones working on robots, so are the Japanese and these items are getting very small as in Nano Size and will some day go in and attack cancer cells. Here are some of the smallest robots being developed:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/200...mbw-3001101.php .

Ants use a chemical communication system, which seems to be superior to human communication. Wasps and ants are of the same basic genome. By detecting smells and odors and CO2 they are able to home in on targets and give off chemicals to get other ants to follow their instructions. All colonies smell the same and other colonies do not smell the same. Each human has a smell as well and this smell can be used to identify people and perhaps small robots might uses chemicals to home in on and detect problems or discover North Korean