Prof. Marco Dorigo
Ph.D. Degree in Electronic Engineering in 1992 from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
15th November 2023, 3:00pm - 4:00pm (GST)
| Title: | Self-organizing Nervous System for Hybrid Swarms of Drones and Ground Robots |
| Location: | Auditorium - 2 (above ARRC) |
| Abstract: | Robot swarms that are fully self-organized without any central coordinating entity have been widely demonstrated. A robot swarm with a fully decentralized architecture is highly redundant, and its collective behavior results indirectly from local interactions. These characteristics provide frequently cited advantages---including scalability, fault tolerance through redundancy, and having no single point of failure---but also result in fundamental problems, including lack of manageability. By contrast, centralized systems are easy to design, control, and manage, but have single points of failure and limited scalability. In the talk, I will present a novel robot swarm architecture for self-organized hierarchy, combining the advantageous features of self-organized and centralized control. Using a heterogeneous swarm of ground robots and aerial vehicles, I will demonstrate the ability of the proposed robot swarm architecture to self-organize a dynamic hierarchical control network using local asymmetric communication. I will show the results of experiments in which the architecture can split and merge independently controlled sub-swarms, replace faulty robots at any point in the hierarchical network, and modify the collective behavior of the swarm on the fly. I will also demonstrate that the proposed architecture maintains the fundamental advantages of using strict self-organization, including scalability of the swarm and interchangeability of individual robots. |
| Bio: | Marco Dorigo received the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering in 1992 from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. From 1992 to 1993, he was a Research Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA. In 1993, he was a NATO-CNR Fellow, and from 1994 to 1996, a Marie Curie Fellow. Since 1996, he has been a tenured Researcher of the FNRS, the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research, and co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the ULB. His current research interests include swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, and metaheuristics for discrete optimization. He is the Founding Editor of Swarm Intelligence, and an Associate Editor or member of the Editorial Boards of many journals on computational intelligence and adaptive systems. Dr. Dorigo is a Fellow of the AAAI, EurAI, and IEEE. He was awarded numerous international prizes among which the Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2003, delivered by Philippe Busquin, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation; the five-year scientific prize du F.R.S.-FNRS in 2005, delivered by Albert II, King of Belgium; the Cajastur International Prize for Soft Computing “Mamdani Prize” in 2007, delivered by Prof. Lofti Zadeh; the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award in 2015, and the IEEE Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2016. He is also the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant awarded by the European Research Council. |