The first ARIAC WP1 meeting of the 2022/23 academic year will take place on Tuesday 13 December 2022 morning. We will invited presentations and presentations from TRAIL/ARIAC researchers about their work.
This meeting will be fully remote, via Teams: link.
Abstract: I investigate how large groups of simple robots can reach a consensus with decentralised minimalistic algorithms. Simple robots can be useful in nanorobotics and in scenarios with low-cost requirements. I show that through decentralised voting algorithms, swarms of minimalistic robots can make best-of-n decisions. In my research, I show that using a biologically-inspired voting model based on inhibitory signals, the swarm can collectively perform better and be more resilient against a minority of misbehaving robots than in models without inhibition. Our best-of-n decision algorithm can also be used for collective environmental monitoring. I will show that investigating these models can be very interesting and lead to surprising results. As Anderson said in 1972, More Is Different. In our analysis, we found that in a range of relevant conditions, limiting the communication range or the speed of the robots can improve collective performance. We explain the mechanisms of some of these phenomena with a combination of mathematical models and large-scale robot experiments.
Short Bio: Andreagiovanni Reina received an MSc degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and a PhD degree in applied sciences from IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. He was a research fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK, from 2015 to 2020. Andreagiovanni is currently a Research Fellow in collective behaviour at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IRIDIA) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, funded by the Belgian F.R.S.-FNRS as a Chargé de Recherches. He has been a researcher in seven European projects on distributed robotic systems since 2009.
Resources:
M.S. Talamali, A. Saha, J.A.R. Marshall, A. Reina. When less is more: Robot swarms adapt better to changes with constrained communication. Science Robotics 6(56): eabf1416, 2021. PDF
Follow-up work: T. Aust, M.S. Talamali, M. Dorigo, H. Hamann, A. Reina. The hidden benefits of limited communication and slow sensing in collective monitoring of dynamic environments. In Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ANTS), LNCS 13491. Springer, Cham, 2022. PDF
A. Reina, R. Zakir, G. De Masi, E. Ferrante. Cross-inhibition leads to group consensus despite the presence of strongly opinionated minorities and asocial behaviour. (Nov 2022) arXiv:2211.09531. PDF
Follow-up / related work: R Zakir, M Dorigo, A Reina. Robot swarms break decision deadlocks in collective perception through cross-inhibition. In Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ANTS), LNCS 13491. Springer, Cham, 2022. PDF
For any question, etc, please contact alberto.franzin at ulb dot be.
The list of all the WP1 meetings.