Saturday, December 21, 2024
FPath: Stigmergic Fill
Well, my initial efforts to build physical things on the next step down on the Feynman Path are proving to be quite frustrating. Turns out hardware is more difficult than software - who knew? Still, no matter, one keeps pressing on.
While the physical side of the project slowly gets its act together I thought I would report on an interesting variation of the “Graphical Stigmergy” technique mentioned in my previous post. This has now manifested itself as Experiment 005.
Basically, this experiment demonstrates an effective method for the 2D filling of an area if you are using inaccurate and imprecise actuators. I call it Stigmergic Fill and there is a short (8 min) video demonstrating it.
Stigmergic Fill lets reality be its own model and, using it, there is no need for a complicated mechanism to build an internal representation of the system state. Things are what they are and, however an inaccuracy or disruption may have happened, the discrepancy between reality and the ideal is immediately obvious and the control software can take steps to address it.
More and more I’m thinking that control at the micro and nano scales will probably be much less of running through a sequence of “go to this exact point and definitively do that” type operations and much more of a general “this needs to be done, activate events which should cause that to happen” and then monitor things to see what actually did happen.
Unavoidable errors and lack of precision at smaller scales will make perfect control impossible to obtain and it is interesting to try and develop compensatory methods in anticipation of that.
