Project description
International Partnership building and support to dialogues
The aim of ASSISI_bf is to develop (1) a fundamental new class of distributed ICT systems, which are bio-hybrid collective adaptive systems (CASs) that consist of two sub-systems: One is a self-organising society of animals; the other one is a society of technical devices. These CASs will solve problems by distributed spatial computation; this heterogeneous system (animals, robots, nodes) will perform collective decision-making and maintain internal homeostasis. (2) We plan to develop a fundamental new method to design CASs by exploiting evolutionary computation on mathematical models that are used to drive the engineered part of the CAS. This way the collective of animals and robots will adapt to environmental changes and will maximize its efficiency and stability. (3) We will develop several novel benchmarks, using the level of acceptance of robots by the animal society as a hard-to-reach criterion. (4) Finally, we will derive a general model for heterogeneous CASs, which will be used to develop new algorithms for other heterogeneous robotic CASs. We address all 3 principles that should be researched for CASs, which are: design, operation and evolution. The project tackles several severe engineering challenges. It has a high potential of impact and foundational character on several communities. On the one hand it has the potential to establish a new field of science, which focuses on self-adapting engineered systems able to integrate themselves into an existing natural society. On the other hand, the proposed long-term impact reaches from establishing important new methods in agriculture, environmental sustainability policies, live stock management, environmental monitoring, bio-hybrid engineering and pharmaceutical industry, as our proposed technology allows fully automated (but non-invasive, non-harmful) experimentation with social animals. By deducting models and algorithms our project can also influence and promote general research of distributed ICT systems.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-ICT-2011-9
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Funding Scheme
CP - Collaborative project (generic)Coordinator
8010 Graz
Austria