Elio Tuci (UNamur)
"The engineering of self-organisation in swarms of robots"
In the first part of this talk, I define swarm robotics by pointing at the biological roots of this type of multi-robot system, and by illustrating the main characteristics and their potentialities with respect to various domains of application. Then, I focus on the so called "design problem", and I show how some of the challenges related to the engineering of the collective responses in swarms of robots can be overcome using a design approach based on the use of neuro-controllers synthesised using evolutionary computation techniques. In the second part of the talk, I illustrate the results of a series of recent studies which exploit the system heterogeneity to achieve specific collective responses.