Department of
MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

Swarm Robotics: Research in Theory and Practice
Presented by: Dr Alan Winfield
University of the West of England

Swarm Robotics is a new discipline which applies the biologically inspired principles of swarm intelligence to the field of mobile robotics in an effort to build highly robust multi-robot systems. Robotic swarms are characterised as systems in which

1. control is completely distributed and decentralised and
2. overall desired swarm behaviour is an emergent consequence of the interaction of individual robots with each other and their environment.

Robot swarms are dynamical, stochastic and sometimes ergodic systems. This makes them challenging to design (because design principles for emergence have not yet been discovered), difficult to mathematically model, difficult to build and difficult to measure.

The Intelligent Autonomous Systems laboratory at UWE, Bristol has - over the past ten years - done pioneering work in the field of swarm robotics. See www.ias.uwe.ac.uk. The laboratory has demonstrated a number of principles of swarm robotics with physical robots for the first time including: emergent two and three colour sorting; flocking helium aerobots in 3 dimensions and the use of range limited wireless communication for adaptive emergent control of swarm morphology. This seminar will describe the lab’s work in swarm robotics, but will do so from a methodological perspective. The seminar will thus focus on the approaches and the tools that we have had to develop in order to conduct research in swarm robotics, including recent work to explore a probabilistic approach to modelling a wireless connected swarm.

1.15 pm Monday 6 June 2005
Venue: 1W 3.6, University of Bath.
ALL WELCOME

For further information about BICS, please contact Professor Chris Budd on 01225 386241 or Professor Giles Hunt on 01225 386796.

Topˆ