David Garzón Ramos (Université Libre de Bruxelles), “Automatic design of robot swarms: context and experiments”

Swarm robotics is a promising approach to the coordination of large groups of robots. Traditionally, the design of collective behaviors for robot swarms has been an iterative manual process: a human designer manually refines the control software of the individual robots until the desired collective behavior emerges.

In this talk, I discuss automatic design as an alternative approach to manual design. In automatic methods, the design process is cast into an optimization problem: given a task to be performed by the swarm, an optimization process designs a collective behavior to perform the task and produces appropriate control software for the robots. I focus on experiments that highlight the various aspects of the automatic design of robot swarms: classes of collective behaviors, control architectures, and the optimization process. In particular, I present a case study on the design of shepherding behaviors for groups of robots. The results presented in this talk are outcomes of the project DEMIURGE; an ERC funded project devoted to the study of the automatic design of robot swarms (PI Mauro Birattari).