McLurkin to Bring Swarm Robots to GCER

Dr. James McLurkin is scheduled to demonstrate his swarm robots at the opening session of the 2010 Global Conference on Educational Robotics on July 7, 2010. Dr. McLurkin is an Assistant Professor at Rice University in the Department of Computer Science.

He holds a S.B. in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Mechanical Engineering from M.I.T., a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley, and a S.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T.

His research focuses on developing distributed algorithms for multi-robot systems, which is software that produces complex group behaviors from the interactions of many simple individuals. These ideas are not new: ants, bees, wasps, and termites have be running this type of software for 120 million years.

The Swarm

The Swarm was originally created during McLurkin's five-year tenure as Lead Research Scientist at iRobot and was the largest swarm in the world at the time. McLurkin was the 2003 recipient of the Lemelson-MIT student prize for invention.

To read more about Dr. McLurkin and his research, take a look at his home page.

See the Swarm Bots in Action

(If the movie above doesn't work for you, try this link.)