Cyborg Insect Networks for Exploration and Mapping (CINEMa)

Abstract:

The present day technology falls short in offering centimeter scale mobile robots that can function effectively under unknown and dynamic environmental conditions. Insects, on the other hand, exhibit an unmatched ability to navigate through a wide variety of environments and overcome perturbations by successfully maintaining control and stability. The major goal of this project is to enhance the technological infrastructure for Cyber-Physical Systems by establishing the fundamental physical and algorithmic building blocks of a biobotic swarm and producing a cyber-physical sensor network among the individuals of non-eusocial insects such as cockroaches and moths with an aim of searching and rescuing victims after natural disasters such as earthquakes. The major activities performed under this project included:

• development of biobot backpack technologies,
• establishment of four biobot tracking testbeds
• investigation of biobotic control strategies with cockroaches Gromphadorhina portentosa and moths Manduca sexta,
• construction of localization & communication infrastructure,
• modeling and controlling collective motion by learning deterministic and stochastic motion models,
• topological motion modeling based on these models,
• the development of a swarm robotic platform to be used as a testbed for proposed algorithms.