Fully mobile machine to machine communication

We are doing a piece of work right now where the evolution of RFID and M2M (machine to machine) services is a part of it. While working on the mobile aspects of this, it occurred to us that most people conceive of the m2m device / agent / whatever as quite dumb - a pallet, a piece of inventory, a truck etc etc, and its main role is to tell something more intelligent about itself.

But what happens if the device itself is (semi) intelligent, and is using the m2m comms as much for its own purposes as much as anything else. One of the interesting insights from work on Artificial Life is that often the combinations of fairly simple rules allow very complex behaviour, and quite a high level of self organisation.

One fairly common example is where the common or garden house vacuum cleaner robot may use m2m comms to tie up with other devices to define when and where it cleans. But as Moore's law progresses these devices can all have more intelligence, and this can allow them to exhibit fairly complex capabilities even for simple devices.

For a start, they could use evolutionary algorithms to learn new tasks - like learning to fly for example:

Learning how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error - but a winged robot has cracked it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles.

Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, built a winged robot and set about testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it.

To begin with, the robot just twitched and jerked erratically. But, gradually, it made movements that gained height. At first, it cheated - simply standing on its wing tips was one early short cut.

After three hours, however, the robot abandoned such methods in favour of a more effective flapping technique, where it rotated its wings through 90 degrees and raised them before twisting them back to the horizontal and pushing down.

"This tells us that this kind of evolution is capable of coming up with flying motion," says Peter Bentley, who works on evolutionary computing at University College London. But while the robot had worked out how best to produce lift, it was not about to take off.

"There's only so much that evolution can do," Bentley says. "This thing is never going to fly because the motors will never have the strength to do it," he says.

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(report from New Scientist)

That was 2002...today, there are robots that can fly like insects - these tiny robot flies (see pic below) for example. Imagine swarms of these operating using self organising behaviour routines (flocking, direction finding etc), each built with a different type of very simple sensor.



But thats just for starters...how about this one - unmanned Aircraft with Solar cells that can in theory cruise the stratosphere in large numbers, using self organising software to keep their coverage going at high levels of reliability - who needs satellites for TV signals, mobile signals, ground surveillance with swarms of these.....the economics vs satellite (or even mobile base station networks) might be pretty interesting.

(The pic below takes it even further - using these to explore Mars)



Now...mash some ideas together - RoboFly RFIDs, Glider Grids....bears thinking about, doesn't it?

Yes, it is "way out there", but it is (theoretically) doable, and it is Friday afternoon after all.