Robot rave swarming MIT

A “high tech rave”-like performance piece happening tonight at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is actually designed to help campus roboticists create algorithms based on human behavior that can better control large swarms of robots, researchers told the Herald.

Doubling as an experiment, “UP: The Umbrella Project” is the second collaboration between MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and acclaimed, Connecticut-based dance company Pilobolus.

At least 200 participants will serve as “human pixels” by holding and using umbrellas outfitted with LED lights at MIT’s Jack Barry Field. Pilobolus members will provide basic instructions and choreography, while campus staff record the resulting human behaviors using an overhead camera mounted on a boom lift, said Kyle Gilpin, a postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL.

“Robots are still very simplistic and it will be a long time before the intelligence of robots and the creativity of robots starts to rival that of humans,” Gilpin, 30, said. “But this performance is one step of many that we think will help bring human-like intelligence and abilities closer to being implemented in robotics systems.”

“UP” debuted in October at the PopTech conference in Camden, Maine.

“The interesting nature of the project is we’re not using trained dancers. We’re not rehearsing this,” Gilpin said. “We’re giving the individual performers a large degree of autonomy to decide as a group exactly what they should do.”

While not a “formal” experiment, MIT researchers plan to use a simulator to mimic the human behavioral patterns and put them into individual robots that perform functions in giant groups, such as exploring Mars or searching for survivors in collapsed buildings, Gilpin said.

Huge robot swarms are typically controlled by a centralized computer that aggregates information from all of the robots in the system and then tells each robot what to do next, Gilpin said, adding this system requires large amounts of processing power and memory.

“We are looking for algorithms that scale very nicely as we increase the number of robots from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to 1 million,” Gilpin said. “When you work at large scale it becomes very favorable to use distributed algorithms.”

MIT CSAIL and Pilobolus previously collaborated on a piece called “Seraph,” which featured a dancer on stage moving among two flying robots. Pilobolus’ Executive Director Itamar Kubovy said the “UP” project is proof that the worlds of art and science can coexist and influence one another.

“Here you provide a kind of a result in what you’re trying to do, but you’re not giving a specific instruction to any kind of individual. You’re allowing the group to self-organize based on the parameters,” Kubovy said. “That’s a very different way of telling a story or creating a work of art than an author, choreographer, writer saying, ‘Here’s my work, do it as I wrote it.’ ”