 | Prof. Marco Dorigo IRIDIA UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES BELGIUM |
| Title | Embodied Swarm Intelligence: The Swarm-bot and the Swarmanoid Experiments |
| Abstract | Swarm intelligence is the discipline that deals with natural and artificial systems composed of many individuals that coordinate using decentralized control and self-organization. In particular, it focuses on the collective behaviors that result from the local interactions of the individuals with each other and with their environment. The characterizing property of a swarm intelligence system is its ability to act in a coordinated way without the presence of a coordinator or of an external controller. Swarm robotics could be defined as the application of swarm intelligence principles to the control of groups of robots. In this talk I will discuss results of Swarm-bots, an experiment in swarm robotics. A swarm-bot is an artifact composed of a swarm of assembled s-bots. The s-bots are mobile robots capable of connecting to, and disconnecting from, other s-bots. In the swarm-bot form, the s-bots are attached to each other and, when needed, become a single robotic system that can move and change its shape. S-bots have relatively simple sensors and motors and limited computational capabilities. A swarm-bot can solve problems that cannot be solved by s-bots alone. In the talk, I will shortly describe the s-bots hardware and the methodology we followed to develop algorithms for their control. Then I will focus on the capabilities of the swarm-bot robotic system by showing video recordings of some of the many experiments we performed to study coordinated movement, path formation, self-assembly, collective transport, shape formation, and other collective behaviors. I will conclude presenting initial results of the Swarmanoid experiment, an extension of swarm-bot to 3-dimensional environments. |
| Bio | Marco Dorigo received the Laurea (Master of Technology) degree in industrial technologies engineering in 1986 and the doctoral degree in information and systems electronic engineering in 1992 from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, and the title of Agrege de l'Enseignement Superieur, from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, in 1995. From 1992 to 1993 he was a Research Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute of Berkeley, CA. In 1993 he was a NATO-CNR Fellow, and from 1994 to 1996 a Marie Curie Fellow. Since 1996 he has been a tenured researcher of the FNRS, the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research, and a Research Director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. He is the inventor of the ant colony optimization metaheuristic. His current research interests include swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, and metaheuristics for discrete optimization. Dr. Dorigo is the Editor-in-Chief of the Swarm Intelligence journal, and an Associate Editor or member of the editorial board for many journals in computational intelligence and adaptive systems among which the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, and the ACM Transactions on Adaptive and Autonomous Systems. Dr. Dorigo was awarded the Italian Prize for Artificial Intelligence in 1996, the Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2003, the Dr A. De Leeuw-Damry-Bourlart award in applied sciences in 2005 and the Cajastur International Prize for Soft Computing in 2007. He is a fellow of the IEEE and of ECCAI. |