The First Robot Swarm, and Evolution's Misfit

Hank shares the nuts-and-bolts of the world’s first robot swarm, and explains what the creepy, cute and extinct animal known as Hallucigenia can teach us about evolution.

Hosted by: Hank Green
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Sources:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-08/hu-ast081214.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2014-08/uoc-nhf081514.php
http://news.sciencemag.org/technology/2014/08/heads-gathering-robot-swarm
http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-create-1-000-robot-swarm-1.15714

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Closed Caption:

[Intro]
Good news, everyone, the robot apocalypse
is now closer than ever!
If you haven't seen it yet, behold the wonder
of the world's first ever robot swarm. Last
week in the journal Science, engineers at
Harvard said they designed 1,024 tiny robots
that are able to organize themselves into
any pattern they're instructed to make, without
any human interaction. It's being hailed as
a milestone in collective artificial intelligence
and it makes me kinda want to find Sarah Connor
and drive her over to SciShow's secret safe-house
in the desert. At the same time, somehow,
it's kind of adorable?
The robots, nicknamed Kilobots, which just
seems like a bad decision to me, are small,
just a few centimeters across, cheap to make,
and very simple. They can communicate with
each other using infrared signals and follow
the same basic principles that ants, fish,
and even individual cells can use to organize
themselves.
Namely, the Harvard engineers programmed each
Kilobot to do three relatively simple things:
figure out where it is in relation to its
fellow robots, identify the edge of the group
of robots, and then move along that edge until
it finds a spot where it's allowed to stop.
The Kilobots were given instructions to make
a certain shape, and four seed robots were
set as the markers where the formation was
supposed to start. After that, the bots just
started to to move arbitrarily, following
the outer edge of the group until it reached
a coordinate that filled in the shape they
were trying to make. Within a few hours, all
one thousand-plus robots followed this pattern
until the shape was complete.
It's the first time that such a large group
of robots have been shown to follow a collective
algorithm, or a shared set of instructions
and rules, and the engineers say this technology
could someday be used to have robots build
buildings, conduct search and rescue on their
own or even form a network of self-driving
vehicles. Just a note to humanity: please
don't let them achieve consciousness.
Nature has a lot of amazing tricks that we
can learn from, but every now and then we
find something in nature that we just can't
figure out. Meet Hallucigenia, a creature
that looks like something Hieronymous Bosch
would have dreamt up after eating a whole
pepperoni pizza before bed.
This bizarre little thing isn't around anymore,
which is kind of too bad because I would like
to play with one, but it lived on the ocean
floor around 505 million years ago. It was
discovered in a Canadian fossil in the 1970's,
and the scientists named it Hallucigenia because
they could not believe what they were seeing.
It had a tail but no apparent head, sharp
spines on its back, and six or seven pairs
of long, gangly legs. To give you a sense
of how perplexing this organism was, it took
years for biologists to realize that they
were actually looking at it upside-down. At
first, they thought the animal's legs were
tentacles on its back, and its tail was its
head, but this week in the journal Nature,
zoologists from the University of Cambridge
say that they have finally figured out what
Hallucigenia was and where it fits on the
tree of life.
The more we understand the evolutionary relationships
of living things, including these extinct
outliers, the clearer picture we get of the
history of life on Earth, and for decades
scientists have been stumped about where this
creature fits in the bigger picture because
it doesn't seem to share any obvious physical
traits with any known animals. For this reason,
it's been described as an "evolutionary misfit,"
but in their search for some anatomical clues,
the Cambridge researchers zeroed-in on a feature
of Hallucigenia that had never before been
studied - its feet. Actually, claws.
Microscopic analysis of its claws showed that
they were made of layers of protein arranged
in cone-shaped stacks, making a structure
that one scientist described as a "conical
onion," and it turns out that the same structure
survives today in one other group of animals
- Velvet Worms, obscure segmented creatures
that live in tropical forests. They look kinda
like caterpillars or worms with feet, but
they're actually more closely related to one
SciShow's favorite animals - the tardigrade.
But the claw-like features that velvet worms
have aren't found on their cute little feet;
they show up in their mouth parts, which are
modified legs that have turned into appendages
used for feeding. So all this means that Hallucigenia
wasn't some evolutionary dead-end but actually
has living relatives, which include some of
the most adorable and resilient little creatures
on the planet.
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow
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