Swarm robotics is the study of how to design groups of robots that operate without relying on any external infrastructure or on any form of centralized control. In a robot swarm, the collective behavior of the robots results from local interactions between the robots and between the robots and the environment in which they act. The design of robot swarms is guided by swarm intelligence principles. These principles promote the realization of systems that are fault tolerant, scalable and flexible.
Marco Dorigo et al. (2014), Scholarpedia, 9(1):1463.
My research in swarm robotics is mainly related to the application of automatic design techniques to the synthesis of behaviours for (large) groups of robots (see also the Evolutionary Robotics section).
Besides that, I developed solutions for application problems relevant in a swarm-robotics context, such as collective construction, exploration and exploitation, self-assembly (Soleymany et al., 2015; Miletitch et al. 2013; Tuci et al., 2006). This work has been carried out mainly within the Swarm-bots and the Swarmanoid projects.
More recently, swarm robotics has been the main testbed for testing the application of design patterns for decentralised systems (Reina et al., 2015), which are discussed in the Distributed Cognition section. This work is mainly carried out within the DICE project.
(2015): A quantitative micro-macro link for collective decisions: the shortest path discovery/selection example. In: Swarm Intelligence, 9 (2-3), pp. 75–102, 2015.
(2014): Autonomous Construction with Compliant Building Material. In: Menegatti,; Michael,; Berns,; Yamaguchi, (Ed.): Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-13), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 2014.
(2014): Cooperative navigation in robotic swarms. In: Swarm Intelligence, 8 (1), pp. 1–33, 2014.
(2013): Information Aggregation Mechanisms in Social Odometry. In: Li'o,; Miglino,; Nicosia,; Nolfi,; Pavone, (Ed.): Advances in Artificial Life (ECAL 2013). Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, pp. 102–109, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013.
(2013): Swarmanoid: a novel concept for the study of heterogeneous robotic swarms. In: IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 20 (4), pp. 60–71, 2013.
(2012): ARGoS: A Modular, Parallel, Multi-Engine Simulator for Multi-Robot Systems. In: Swarm Intelligence, 6 (4), pp. 271–295, 2012.
(2006): Cooperation through self-assembling in multi-robot systems. In: ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, 1 (2), pp. 115–150, 2006.
(2006): SWARM-BOT: Design and Implementation of Colonies of Self-assembling Robots. In: Yen,; Fogel, (Ed.): Computational Intelligence: Principles and Practice, pp. 103–135, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, New York, NY, 2006.