Project description
Insect-inspired robots are tomorrow’s construction workers
Ants use teamwork to transport food to their nests and termites work together to build towering mounds. The collective intelligence of these social insects has caught the attention of computer scientists and engineers who are keen to build robotic systems with similar building behaviours. Swarm robotics is a field of robotics where scientists aim to understand and to implement this collective intelligence on a group of robots. The EU-funded SRoCS project will investigate how swarm robotics can be applied to construction. The project will use a combination of simulation and hardware to experimentally determine the extent to which the building behaviour of social insects can be realised in a swarm of self-organising robots.
Objective
This proposal details an investigation into the development of control software for swarms of robots tasked with building structures. The behavior of the individual robots in this work will be fully autonomous and will be based on the nest building behavior of social insects. It is of interest to investigate whether the building behavior of social insects can be transferred to and implemented in a swarm of robots since the social insect behavior has been shown to be parallel, robust, and scalable.
I outline in this proposal the second milestone of my ambitious research project that I have devised to investigate how swarm robotics can be applied to construction. I completed the first milestone of this research project during my doctoral studies, where I implemented and validated a swarm robotics construction system using both hardware and simulation.
I have organized the second milestone of my research project into four work packages. In these work packages, I will develop, implement, and validate control software for a swarm of robots, which must perform a construction task. These work packages use a combination of the simulation and hardware tools that I developed during my doctoral studies to efficiently and accurately answer a number of open research questions. I have designed these work packages to be completed at IRIDIA where I have access to world-class facilities such as a computer cluster with more than 1000 CPUs for running simulations and a state-of-the-art arena and tracking setup for running hardware experiments.
I believe that by undertaking the second milestone of this project at IRIDIA under the supervision of Prof. Marco Dorigo, I will be able to successfully establish myself as an independent researcher.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
1050 Bruxelles / Brussel
Belgium