Adda Avendaño
Technological advances in robotics have optimized the productivity of public and private companies around the world by providing cutting-edge tools for a variety of industries seeking to transfer some activities from humans to machines, as is the case today with courier and package delivery.
Faced with this reality, Guillermo Ramírez Olvera and Edmundo Josué Sánchez Méndez, Computer Systems Engineers graduated from the Escuela Superior de Cómputo (Escom) of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), developed MemOso, an autonomous robot capable of tracing its route to deliver packages to a specific recipient, the first of its kind, whose routing engine is based on a cellular automaton.
Development of the prototype With the advice of Dr. Genaro Juárez Martínez, from Escom, and Luz Noé Oliva Moreno, from the Unidad Profesional Interdisciplinaria de Ingeniería Campus Hidalgo (UPIIH), in coordination with Professor Andrew Adamatzky from the Unconventional Computing Lab (UCL) of the University of the West of England, the young polytechnic students took a previously developed model, as a skeleton, and made a series of improvements.
The architecture of the MemOso robot is a kind of cube with dimensions of 60 centimeters on each side, four wheels, and a transparent acrylic "safety box" with a servomotor, placed on top to move documents and packages. Inside, there are direct current motors -used in toy cars that children can drive-, controllers and ultrasonic sensors, as well as a gyroscope to calculate its four types of movement: forward, backward, turning to the right, or to the left.
MemOso has its web system where users can request the courier service, which, for the moment, is exclusive to the 1st floor of Escom's government building, which has different office areas. There they must enter the location and e-mail address of the recipient, who will be the only one who will be able to open the acrylic box with their password, once the courier robot arrives at the indicated location.
"To make the messenger detect obstacles and be able to reconfigure itself to trace a route in real-time, it was necessary to develop an algorithm based on a fungus called Physarum Polycephalum, whose study and biological description was carried out by Professor Adamatzky in England, and its translation as a cellular automaton was done at Escom," reported Edmundo Sanchez.
This robot works with artificial intelligence since the young people developed the routing algorithm based on a fungus called Physarum Polycephalum, a unicellular organism capable of building paths in parallel and all directions, to search for food, and thus build networks to exploit new resources that supply it.
The conditions in which the organism grows are generally humid, in tropical areas or temperate forests, especially on decaying bark. In nature, it has the function of decomposing, recycling nutrients, and transporting energy to the food chain, when consumed by insects. The main characteristics of its behavior are exploration and nutrient transport.
It is considered a complex system because the interaction of the primitive elements leads to large-scale emergent behaviors that are not easy to predict even when repeating the same initial conditions of the system, so its global dynamics lead to collective behavior and self-organization.
"We tried to take its behavior, which is fascinating because, with few rules, the cellular automaton can model something as complex as routes, as many as necessary, depending on the nutrients along the way, which it surrounds to form networks similar to transport routes," said Guillermo Ramirez.
He added that, some years ago, British and Japanese scientists studied the growth strategy of this mold, which when feeding grows and merges to spread in a network, a behavior that scientists incorporated into a mathematical formula to apply to the development of roads. The model was successfully tested by simulating the subway network of Japan and Mexico; in research by Dr. Genaro Juarez, it was used to model the layout of roads in Mexico and also to model the mobility of Mexican migrants to the United States.
To load the algorithm, they used a Raspberry Pi, a type of small computer with an operating system on a chip. The robot calculates the best route or makes adjustments if it encounters an obstacle along the way from the Raspberry Pi. Moreover, the security protocol for packet delivery is controlled from there.
The Terminal Project "Modeling of the Physarum Polycephalum with cellular automata for the routing of messenger robots", with which the young people graduated as Computer Systems Engineers, was developed under the Prototyping Methodology, that is, the work was divided into three parts:
1) Modeling the behavior of Physarum Polycephalum with cellular automata as a simulator.
2) The interface for users to make use of the robot.
3) The robot with sensors for obstacle detection and the creation of the routes generated by the bio-inspired algorithm.
As a whole, MemOso (combination of the name and nickname of the creators: Memo, for Guillermo and Oso, Edmundo's nickname), proposes a new modeling of the Physarum Polycephalum, which makes use of a cellular automaton through Moore's Neighborhood, which is defined as the set of eight cells surrounding a central one, in a square lattice of two dimensions, which guarantees to find at least one route within a universe of possibilities.
The construction of this robot, which involved the solution of an electronics, mechatronics, and programming problem, is part of a project of the Artificial Life Robotics (ALIROB), of Escom, which objective is to use projects based on artificial intelligence, complex systems, and dynamic systems to be implemented in low-cost robots.
It is a mathematical and computational model for a dynamic system that evolves in discrete steps, using an evolution rule with variables called cells that change state or value according to the criteria of neighboring cells from an initial configuration to generate complex behaviors starting from simple elements or rules.
MemOso is a low-cost robot that can carry up to five kilograms in weight and has been successfully used in the management of the Escuela Superior de Cómputo, so its creators are already working on its patent.
For more information consult
Artificial Life Robotics Lab project: https://www.comunidad.escom.ipn.mx/ALIwrROB
MemoSo pages
https://www.comunidad.escom.ipn.mx/ALIROB/MemOso/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reyo0fs854s
Selección Gaceta Politécnica #161. 2023, April 30th. IPN Imagen Institucional: Read the full magazine in spanish here
INSTITUTO POLITÉCNICO NACIONAL
D.R. Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN). Av. Luis Enrique Erro S/N, Unidad Profesional Adolfo López Mateos, Zacatenco, Alcaldía Gustavo A. Madero, C.P. 07738, Ciudad de México. Conmutador: 55 57 29 60 00 / 55 57 29 63 00.
Esta página es una obra intelectual protegida por la Ley Federal del Derecho de Autor, puede ser reproducida con fines no lucrativos, siempre y cuando no se mutile, se cite la fuente completa y su dirección electrónica; su uso para otros fines, requiere autorización previa y por escrito de la Dirección General del Instituto.
