Marco Dorigo
Marco Dorigo received his PhD in electronic engineering in 1992 from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and the title of Agrégé de l’Enseignement Supérieur, from Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in 1995. Since 1996, he has been a tenured Researcher of the fund for scientific research F.R.S.-FNRS of Belgium’s French Community, and a Research Director of IRIDIA, ULB. He is the inventor of the ant colony optimization metaheuristic. His current research interests include swarm intelligence and swarm robotics. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Swarm Intelligence. Dr. Dorigo is an IEEE, AAAI, and ECCAI Fellow. He was awarded the Italian Prize for Artificial Intelligence in 1996, the EU Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2003, the Belgian Dr. A. De Leeuw–Damry–Bourlart award in applied sciences in 2005, the Spanish Cajastur International Prize for Soft Computing in 2007, an ERC Advanced Grant in 2010, the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award in 2015, and the IEEE Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2016.
Robots with Mergeable nervous system for stigmergy-based construction
I will start my talk by
presenting recent research on mergeable nervous
systems for robot swarms. Robots with mergeable
nervous systems can merge their bodies and control
systems to form entirely new robots that retain full
sensorimotor control. This new control paradigm
enables robots to exhibit properties that go beyond
those of any existing machine or of any biological
organism: the robots we present can merge to form
larger bodies with a single centralised controller,
split into separate bodies with independent
controllers, and self-heal by removing or replacing
malfunctioning body parts.
In future work, I
intend to study how an extended version of the
mergeable nervous system can be used to control swarms
of robots that cooperate to build structures
exploiting stigmergic communication. In order to do
so, we have designed and built a novel robotic
platform consisting of "stigmergic cubes" and robots
capable of manipulating them. In the second part of
the talk, I will introduce this novel hardware and
present initial experiments towards stigmergy guided
construction.
