Randomness prevents gridlock in crowded robot swarms
Adding a controlled amount of wiggle room to a robot's path allows dense collectives to bypass traffic jams that would otherwise stall perfectly straight movement.
When a swarm of robots is sent into a confined space to clean an oil spill or assemble equipment, adding more machines eventually leads to diminishing returns. Beyond a certain density, the robots begin to interfere with one another, creating gridlock that brings the entire operation to a crawl. Researchers at Harvard discovered that the solution to this congestion is not stricter central control, but the introduction of intentional randomness.
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