The Emergence of Artificial Culture in Robot Societies is a four year projected aimed at investigating how artificial cultures emerge within a group of robots.

Spearheaded by Professor Alan Winfield at the University of the West of England, his team will create around 60 miniature robots organized into groups — or villages. I’ve found no specific details on the robots other than that they interact and imitate eachother.

It seems a bit strange to me, using physical robots for these purposes as the project seems to revolve around communication and the emergence of behavioral traits, rather than anything that’s specifically related to physical environments. A simulation would be easier to manage (and cheaper) for these purposes. From what I’ve read — they’re seeking physical information loss (sensor noise) when the robots imitate eachother, which is important to produce novel behavior.

Again, I’m intrigued, why not simulation? But add as a sidenote that a physical “village of robots” does sound a lot cooler than a simulation of it. It’d be really cool doing that in the Icelandic lava outside of Reykjavik (I instantly think of the name “Robotic Lava Larvae Societies”, can’t you envision it?! oh man.)

Because these are real, physical robots, when one robot copies another’s behaviour it will be slightly different than the original and the differences are sometimes surprising and unexpected. Once the robots have been interacting for a period of time the project team will alter the conditions of the experiment by evolving the robots’ neural networks so they are better adapted to recognising and responding to the emerging behaviours. These two phases of the experiment will be alternated several times over a period of perhaps months during which time the robots will learn and copy new behaviours many times. It is hoped that this will eventually produce a set of novel behaviours in the robot society which are qualitatively and quantitatively different from the behaviours at the start of the experiment and which can be likened to an emerging ‘robot culture’. [Read more...]

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is giving the project 735,507 british pounds (that’s $1.4 million USD) to support this four year project.

Interestingly for us, they’re planning to set up a website (presumably with webcams) so that we can observe the artificial village of swarming robots. My applause, look forward to seeing them.

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