IPLS Seminar - Dr. Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol)

Abstract: Swarm engineering allows us to design self-organised systems that work in large numbers (>1000), and at small scales (<1 cm). Swarm strategies are either inspired from nature (ant colonies, fish shoals, bird flocks, cellular systems) or are automatically discovered using machine learning and crowdsourcing. Demonstrated applications range from the deployment of swarms of flying robots to create outdoor communication networks, or the use of 1000 coin-sized robots to form structures and explore the environment, to the design of nanoparticles and synthetic bacteria for biomedical applications. Ultimately, we aim to develop a unified framework for the engineering of swarms across scales.