Seminar Details
2009-03-31 (14.00) : The Swarm-bot Experience in Swarm Robotics
At Euler building
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Marco DORIGO (IRIDIA/ULB)
Abstract :
A swarm-bot is an artifact composed of a swarm of assembled robots called s-bots.
The s-bots are mobile robots capable of connecting to, and disconnecting from,
other s-bots. S-bots have relatively simple sensors and motors and limited compu-
tational capabilities. In the swarm-bot form, the s-bots are attached to each
other, forming a single robotic system that can move and change its shape.
A swarm-bot can solve problems that cannot be solved by s-bots alone, and is par-
ticularly robust to malfunctioning components.
In the talk, after shortly describing the s-bots hardware and the
methodology we followed to develop algorithms for their control, 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
reconfiguration, distributed fault detection and other collective behaviors.