Vito Trianni
Vito Trianni is a permanent researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR). He received the Ph.D. in Applied Sciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 2006, a master in Information and Communication Technology from CEFRIEL (Italy) in 2001, and the M.Sc. in Computer Science Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2000. He has authored about 100 publications, among which 1 book and 32 publications in international journals with peer review. Vito Trianni’s research mainly involves swarm intelligence and swarm robotics studies, with particular emphasis on the design and analysis of complex self-organising systems and distributed cognitive processes. He pioneered the domain of Evolutionary Swarm Robotics, that is, the synthesis of collective behaviours for robotic swarms through the exploitation of evolutionary robotics techniques. More recently, he is also conducting research on the analysis and design of large-scale decentralised systems, not limited to swarm robotics systems (e.g., cognitive radio networks, cyber-physical and socio-technical systems).
Drone swarms in the field
Precision agriculture represents a very promising domain for swarm robotics, as it deals with expansive fields and tasks that can be parallelised and executed with a collaborative approach. Weed monitoring and mapping is one such problem, and solutions have been proposed that exploit swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In this talk, I will present the work performed towards the deployment of UAV swarms in the field. I will present the implementation of collective behaviours for weed monitoring and mapping, starting from parallel field coverage, moving to collaborative mapping of weeds, and finally discussing strategies for the self-organised deployment of UAVs into the field to implement non-uniform coverage strategies.
