How do natural swarms interact and how can we use that to our benefit in robotics? Visitors to the first ever Somerscience, which took place in Bruton on the May Day bank holiday, found out the answers to these questions and more and became robot swarms themselves in our special TAS swarm game. Neshika, Suet, Razanne, Fern and Matimba from our swarm team gave an insight into their research, whilst guiding the visitors of all ages to their spot on the leaderboard. In small teams the human ‘robots’ and their controller were asked to move all the boxes to the landing zone- and figure out the rules for moving the different types of boxes as they went along. The team also showed videos of the swarm robots and posters detailing their work. Later our very own Sabine took to the stage to answer questions for a special edition of I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here. By the end of the day we had a winning time of 1 minute 45 seconds– and our demonstrators really enjoyed talking to interested and enthusiastic members of the public.
Thanks to all the organisers and visitors on the day- if you’d like a robot swarm to descend on your event, do get in touch.
