Automatic Design of Robot Swarms
The research project "DEMIURGE: automatic design of robot swarms" was funded by the European Research Council via an ERC Consolidator Grant between 2016 and 2022.
Principal investigator: Mauro Birattari
The scope of the DEMIURGE project is the automatic design of robot swarms. Swarm robotics is an appealing approach to the coordination of large groups of robots. Previously, the collective behavior of robot swarms had been designed via some labor-intensive process.
The project advanced the state of the art in swarm robotics by developing a novel approach to designing and realizing collective behaviors for robot swarms. In this approach, a mission to be performed is specified using a high-level specification language. The design problem is then automatically formulated as an optimization problem that is itself always automatically solved in a computation-intensive way based on simulations.
All in all, this process automatically generates the control software of the individual robots that determines the desired collective behavior, that is, the one that enables the swarm to successfully perform the mission at hand. The approach can be used to concurrently design, together with the control software, also the hardware of the individual robots.
In the project, we studied several control software structures, optimization algorithms, ways to specify requirements, validation protocols, on-line adaptation mechanisms and techniques for generating solution strategies at run time.
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Relevant software, hardware, and teaching material produced in the DEMIURGE project.
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