Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), “Breaking swarm stereotypes: Scalability, adaptability, and robustness in real-world applications”

Sabine Hauert is Professor of Swarm Engineering at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her research focuses on making swarms for people, and across scales, from nanorobots for cancer treatment, to larger robots for environmental monitoring, or logistics. Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT, and deployed swarms of flying robots at EPFL.

The distributed nature of swarm robotics has the potential to enable out-of-the-box solutions in real-world environments that adapt, scale, and are robust to failure. To achieve this potential, we may need to broaden our perception of swarms being composed of large numbers of autonomous, simple, and often homogeneous agents that use local interaction and sensing alone. Instead, we propose a shift towards swarms with emergent properties that are easy to design, monitor, control, and validate by humans. We show how swarms can rely on sophisticated perception of their local environment, and share some information quasi-globally. Finally we envision a world where swarms of specialised robots have a shared awareness of their operations and co-exist in common environments, coordinating tasks in construction, farming, logistics, and environmental preservation.

This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and will be available as a live stream.

Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.