CASCB Talk: The power of inhibition for collective decision making in minimalistic robot swarms
Time
Monday, 5. February 2024
15:30 - 16:30
Location
ZT702 and online
Organizer
CASCB
Speaker:
Dr. Andreagiovanni Reina, CASCB/University of Konstanz
Dr. Andreagiovanni Reina investigates 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. He shows that through decentralised voting algorithms, swarms of minimalistic robots can make best-of-n decisions. In his research, he shows 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. Their best-of-n decision algorithm can also be used for collective environmental monitoring. He will show that investigating these models can be very interesting and lead to surprising results. As Anderson said in 1972, More Is Different. In their analysis, they found that in a range of relevant conditions, limiting the communication range or the speed of the robots can improve collective performance. They explain the mechanisms of some of these phenomena with a combination of mathematical models and large-scale robot experiments.
Andreagiovanni Reina is a Junior Research Group Leader of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour of the University of Konstanz, Germany. His research is highly interdisciplinary in both its scope and its methodology, with numerous contributions to a variety of disciplines, including computer science, robotics, theoretical biology, physics, cognitive neuroscience and psychology. Andreagiovanni's interdisciplinary approach consists of combining techniques from dynamical systems theory, statistical physics, network science, statistical optimality theory, multiagent simulation and large-scale robotics. Andreagiovanni has been 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. Previous to that, Andreagiovanni was a Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield (UK) from 2015 to 2020. He holds a PhD in Applied Sciences from IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and an MSc in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He has been a researcher in several European projects on distributed robotic systems since 2009.
