After one and a half years of dedicated work by Markus P. Nemitz (lead-researcher) and colleagues, the HoverBot system becomes a central research tool to the Stokes Research Group. This work started when we discovered that there was a lack of affordable robots that were easy to manufacture and easy to extend with arbitrary sensors to conduct research on the fundamental understanding of local-to-global behaviours of large collectives. This research field is commonly referred to as swarm intelligence, or more generally, complex systems.
The HoverBot is a levitating circuit board with an array of planar coils that interact with magnetic anchors which are embedded into a levitation table. The robot is extremely manufacturable since it is made solely using a populated circuit board. Mass-manufacture, therefore, is a simple case of placing a batch order with a PCB* foundry. Assembly of the robots post-fabrication takes literally seconds since it only involves plugging in a battery.
We are interested in using the HoverBot system to study a variety of complex behaviours that range from understanding financial markets to exploring cancerous cells and their local interactions. We appreciate that in-silico computer simulations occupy a central place in in research, but real-world experiments are a necessity if we want to consider all the interactions that occur in the physical world, and which are very hard to reproduce in computer simulations. The HoverBot system brings an unprecedented ease of manufacture, and this scalability will unlock new types of experiments in the field of swarm intelligence.
If you are interested in more details about the HoverBot system, please have a look at our recent journal publication or contact our research group.
HoverBots: Precise Locomotion Using Robots That Are Designed for Manufacturability
*Printed Circuit Board
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