Event overview
Marco Dorigo will present an exciting Whitehead Lecture on two of his situated robotics projects.
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 and Swarmanoid, two experiments 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 recent results of the Swarmanoid experiment, an extension of swarm-bot to heterogeneous swarms acting in 3-dimensional environments.
Biography:
Marco Dorigo received his Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering in 1992 from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, and the title of Agrégé de l’Enseignement Supérieur from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, in 1995.
From 1992 to 1993, he was a Research Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, California. 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 Université 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. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Swarm Intelligence, and an Associate Editor or member of the Editorial Boards of many journals on computational intelligence and adaptive systems.
Dr. Dorigo is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI). He 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 the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant (2010).
http://www.swarmanoid.org/
http://www.swarm-bots.org/
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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14 Mar 2012 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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