Researchers at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) have developed a new swarm architecture inspired by the human nervous system that could improve co-operation among robots in teams. Their proposed approach, outlined in a paper published in Science Robotics, allows robots to self-organize themselves into sub-swarms, to improve their coordination while they are sensing their environment, moving and planning their next steps towards completing a mission. “In the past two decades, swarm robotics research has demonstrated a wide range of powerful collective behaviors that do not require any central coordinating entity or process,” Dr. Mary Katherine Heinrich, co-first author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at the IRIDIA artificial intelligence lab of ULB, told Tech Xplore. “Despite such progress, robot swarms have still struggled to transition from laboratory experiments to real-world applications. This is because, from the point of view of many application domains, self-organization also has important disadvantages.” Achieving self-organization in robot swarms is a challenging research goal. This is because while desired behaviors occur at the group level, robots are programmed individually, which makes designing swarm behaviors analytically extremely difficult. “Developing new swarm behaviors is a time-consuming trial-and-error process, and, once new swarm behaviors have been developed, they cannot be easily modified or combined,” explained Prof. Marco Dorigo, senior author of the paper and the director of the IRIDIA artificial intelligence lab of ULB.

Full report : Researchers in Brussels have developed a framework to deploy robot swarms which could allow humans to complete various real-world tasks faster and more efficiently.