Seminar: Recent advances in distributed robotics, Dr Roderich Gross, University of Sheffield

Abstract:
In this talk, first, we consider the problem of designing behavioural rules for groups of robots of extreme simplicity. We show how so-called "computation-free" robots, with only one or a few bits of sensory information, can accomplish a range of tasks, and demonstrate this with systems of up to 40 real robots, which are either loosely coupled (swarm) or tightly coupled (modular reconfigurable robot). Second, we consider groups of robots that are more capable, discussing the formal design and analysis of cooperative behaviour, as well as applications from manufacturing to domestic environments.

Bio:
Roderich Gross is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, and in 2018 has been a Visiting Scientist at CSAIL, MIT. He received a Ph.D. degree in engineering science in 2007 from Université libre de Bruxelles in 2007, and was a JSPS Fellow (Tokyo Institute of Technology) and a Marie Curie Fellow (EPFL & Unilever). He has made contributions to the coordination of swarm and reconfigurable robots, and invented a machine learning method called Turing Learning. Dr Gross has served as the General Chair of DARS 2016, Editor of IROS 2015-19, and as an Associate Editor of Swarm Intelligence, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and ICRA 2020.