El pueblo inteligente de Colombia

ORIGINAL: Semana

Según un experto

“Es un buen caso de cómo el conocimiento de la universidad se aplica en la vida real. Un caso exitoso de inteligencia colectiva y una solución que podría replicarse en el país”.

Arquitecto Alberto Saldarriaga, decano de la Facultad de Artes y Diseño de la Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano.

Se dice que dos cabezas piensan más que una y Palomino, en La Guajira, es la prueba. Es el único caso en el país en que los arquitectos y la comunidad se reunieron para trabajar por el pueblo. 

Hoy tiene un rostro distinto.

Esta propuesta arquitectónica de inclusión social ha llamado la atención a nivel nacional e internacional. Unió a los habitantes del corregimiento Palomino, de Dibulla, en La Guajira, para una misma causa: rediseñar su pueblo.

Cada uno de sus 4.000 habitantes aportó ideas y mano de obra en el proceso de construcción, un modelo de inteligencia colectiva. No hubo jerarquías entre quienes participaron: la comunidad, los alumnos de la asignatura Proyecto Nuevos Territorios de la Universidad Javeriana y los grupos de arquitectos Zoohaus, Zuloark y Mitin.

Así, desde 2009, empezaron a construir la casa de la cultura, en la que hoy se dictan talleres del Sena y se integran los kogui con los palominenses. También fabricaron un carrito de comidas en el que se venden pinchos, arepas y otros platos típicos cuyas ganancias van para los niños del pueblo. Además, se hizo la casa de los deportes, con cancha de fútbol, y un parque para los niños, con sogas y materiales de la región.

Y, lo más importante, un novedoso sistema de sanitarios, pues Palomino lleva casi 30 años sin alcantarillado. “Esto generaba un desastre antihigiénico al momento de drenar los pozos sépticos”, dice Sebastián Posada, habitante de Palomino. Estos también contaminaban las aguas subterráneas y los ríos.

Pero con el proyecto Palomino Sociedad en Construcción fueron reemplazados por baños secos, que funcionan sin agua. Separan los residuos líquidos de los sólidos, que no se pierden: los habitantes los mezclan con desechos agrícolas para abonar las huertas donde cultivan vegetales, escasos en la región. Además, la cubierta del baño seco recoge el agua de lluvia y la reutiliza.

Este ambicioso proyecto de innovación social, que tuvo un costo aproximado de 90 millones, ha sido premiado por varias entidades: la Bienal Colombiana de Arquitectura, la Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura y la Unesco. Sin embargo, para el arquitecto Carlos Hernández, cabeza del proyecto, lo más importante de esta iniciativa es el impacto que ha tenido en la comunidad.

¿Por qué son mejores los baños secos?

Instalar un baño seco en Palomino cuesta 850.000 pesos mientras que llevar el alcantarillado costaría 8 millones de pesos. Ahora en cada casa, con cuatro habitantes en promedio, apenas se consume 2.800 litros de agua anuales con esta solución sanitaria. Si tuvieran alcantarillado o un pozo séptico esta cifra sería de 20.000 y 23.000 litros de agua, respectivamente. En total, los 500 hogares ahorrarían 10 millones de litros de agua y dejarían de contaminar 125 millones de litros, el equivalente a 50 piscinas olímpicas de 50 metros de longitud por 25 de ancho.

Robotic construction crew needs no foreman

Harvard graduate student Kirstin Petersen (left) and staff scientist Justin Werfel (right) traveled to Namibia to study termite mounds—the inspiration for the TERMES robots that can autonomously build towers, castles, and pyramids out of foam bricks. Credit: Harvard's Wyss Institute

Cambridge, Mass. — On the plains of Namibia, millions of tiny termites are building a mound of soil—an 8-foot-tall "lung" for their underground nest. During a year of construction, many termites will live and die, wind and rain will erode the structure, and yet the colony's life-sustaining project will continue.

Inspired by the termites' resilience and collective intelligence, a team of computer scientists and engineers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has created an autonomous robotic construction crew. The system needs no supervisor, no eye in the sky, and no communication: just simple robots—any number of robots—that cooperate by modifying their environment.

Harvard's TERMES system demonstrates that collective systems of robots can build complex, three-dimensional structures without the need for any central command or prescribed roles. The results of the four-year project were presented this week at the AAAS 2014 Annual Meeting and published in the February 14 issue of Science.

The TERMES robots can build towers, castles, and pyramids out of foam bricks, autonomously building themselves staircases to reach the higher levels and adding bricks wherever they are needed. In the future, similar robots could lay sandbags in advance of a flood, or perform simple construction tasks on Mars.

"The key inspiration we took from termites is the idea that you can do something really complicated as a group, without a supervisor, and secondly that you can do it without everybody discussing explicitly what's going on, but just by modifying the environment," says principal investigator Radhika Nagpal, Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard SEAS. She is also a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute, where she co-leads the Bioinspired Robotics platform.

The TERMES robots can carry bricks, build staircases, and climb them to add bricks to a structure, following low-level rules to independently complete a construction project. Credit: Eliza Grinnell, Harvard SEAS

"We try to draw inspiration from the elegant ways in which Nature self organizes and self regulates," said Wyss Institute Founding Director Don Ingber, Ph.D., M.D., "and this latest feat by our robotics team is clear evidence of the tremendous potential of bioinspired engineering, and its ability to spawn truly game-changing technologies."

Most human construction projects today are performed by trained workers in a hierarchical organization, explains lead author Justin Werfel, a staff scientist in bioinspired robotics at the Wyss Institute and a former SEAS postdoctoral fellow.

"Normally, at the beginning, you have a blueprint and a detailed plan of how to execute it, and the foreman goes out and directs his crew, supervising them as they do it," he says. "In insect colonies, it's not as if the queen is giving them all individual instructions. Each termite doesn't know what the others are doing or what the current overall state of the mound is."

Instead, termites rely on a concept known as stigmergy, a kind of implicit communication: they observe each others' changes to the environment and act accordingly. That is what Nagpal's team has designed the robots to do, with impressive results. Supplementary videos published with the Science paper show the robots cooperating to build several kinds of structures and even recovering from unexpected changes to the structures during construction.

The TERMES robots, developed at Harvard, act independently but collectively. Credit: Eliza Grinnell, Harvard SEAS.

Each robot executes its building process in parallel with others, but without knowing who else is working at the same time. If one robot breaks, or has to leave, it does not affect the others. This also means that the same instructions can be executed by five robots or five hundred. The TERMES system is an important proof of concept for scalable, distributed artificial intelligence.

Nagpal's Self-Organizing Systems Research Group specializes in distributed algorithms that allow very large groups of robots to act as a colony. Close connections between Harvard's computer scientists, electrical engineers, and biologists are key to her team's success. They created a swarm of friendly Kilobots a few years ago and are contributing artificial intelligence expertise to the ongoing RoboBees project, in collaboration with Harvard faculty members Robert J. Wood and Gu-Yeon Wei.

"When many agents get together—whether they're termites, bees, or robots—often some interesting, higher-level behavior emerges that you wouldn't predict from looking at the components by themselves," says Werfel. "Broadly speaking, we're interested in connecting what happens at the low level, with individual agent rules, to these emergent outcomes."

Coauthor Kirstin Petersen, a graduate student at Harvard SEAS with a fellowship from the Wyss Institute, spearheaded the design and construction of the TERMES robots and bricks. These robots can perform all the necessary tasks—carrying blocks, climbing the structure, attaching the blocks, and so on—with only four simple types of sensors and three actuators.


Watch a video of the robots in action.

"We co-designed robots and bricks in an effort to make the system as minimalist and reliable as possible," Petersen says. "Not only does this help to make the system more robust; it also greatly simplifies the amount of computing required of the onboard processor. The idea is not just to reduce the number of small-scale errors, but more so to detect and correct them before they propagate into errors that can be fatal to the entire system."

In contrast to the TERMES system, it is currently more common for robotic systems to depend on a central controller. These systems typically rely on an "eye in the sky" that can see the whole process or on all of the robots being able to talk to each other frequently. These approaches can improve group efficiency and help the system recover from problems quickly, but as the numbers of robots and the size of their territory increase, these systems become harder to operate. In dangerous or remote environments, a central controller presents a single failure point that could bring down the whole system.

"It may be that in the end you want something in between the centralized and the decentralized system—but we've proven the extreme end of the scale: that it could be just like the termites," says Nagpal. "And from the termites' point of view, it's working out great."

This research was supported by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

What can a TERMES robot do?
- Move forward, backward, and turn in place
- Climb up or down a step the height of one brick
- Pick up a brick, carry it, and deposit it directly in front of itself
- Detect other bricks and robots in immediate vicinity
- Keep track of its own location with respect to a "seed" brick

What instructions do the TERMES robots follow?
- Obey predetermined traffic rules
- Circle the growing structure to find the first, "seed" brick (for orientation)
- Climb onto the structure
- Obtain a brick
- Attach the brick at any vacant point that satisfies local geometric requirements
- Climb off the structure
- Repeat

ORIGINAL: Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering 
Date: Feb 13, 2014

“MicroMAX” - the networked swarm car

ORIGINAL: ZeitNews

FEBRUARY 25, 2013

Rinspeed and Harman develop comprehensive mobility concept and corresponding vehicle. The incarnation of the idea is: “MicroMAX” - the networked swarm car

Frank M. Rinderknecht. 
Founder and CEO of Rinspeed Inc.
Photo: Rinspeed Inc.

At the very latest ever since the publication of Frank Schätzing’s novel “The Swarm”, everyone knows of the potential power of intelligent collectives - much more powerful than merely the sum of all its individuals. With “microMAX” Frank M. Rinderknecht, boss of Swiss creative powerhouse Rinspeed, transfers the idea of swarm intelligence to urban traffic and sets out to do nothing less than to revolutionize it.

The incarnation of the idea is “microMAX,” on display at the Geneva Motor Show, March 7 through 17, 2013. The ingenious commuter vehicle merges personal and public transportation in very clever fashion. In the Rinspeed “microMAX”, renowned manufacturer of top-class automotive multimedia and infotainment systems Harman for the first time introduces its vision of an “urbanSWARM” community concept based on the Harman Cloud platform.

This concept involves combining the company’s individual technical features that are already available commercially today with a comprehensive Cloud-based mobility concept. This allows, for instance, easy access to navigation functions in real time. Based on the information from all vehicles connected to the swarm, the system can modify the routes dynamically to account for current traffic.

Rinderknecht says: “We have developed an intelligent and eco-friendly mobility concept complete with its own vehicle that combines the benefits of personal transportation with those of taxis, car-sharing services and carpool concepts as well as those offered by public transit. It uses the powerful UMTS and LTE data networks in urban centers and operates in real time.”