Event details

Speaker:
Dr. Mary Katherine Heinrich, IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

Swarm robotics is often studied for the practical advantages associated with self-organization: scalability, flexibility, the absence of single points of failure, and some degree of inherent fault tolerance. In the past decades, swarm robotics research has demonstrated a wide range of powerful collective behaviours that do not require any central coordinating entity or process. However, 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. In fully self-organized in robot swarms, desired behaviours occur at the group level, but the robots are programmed at the individual level. This makes swarm behaviours difficult or impossible to design analytically. Developing new swarm behaviours is a time-consuming trial-and-error process, and, once new swarm behaviours have been developed, they cannot be easily modified or combined. Our motivation has been to address this challenge by combining aspects of centralized control with aspects of self-organized control, to try to harness the benefits of both in one unified system.

Mary Katherine Heinrich has been a Postdoctoral Researcher with IRIDIA, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, since 2019. Prior to this, she was a Research Associate in the Service Robotics Group, Institute of Computer Engineering, Universität zu Lübeck, Luebeck, Germany, from 2018 to 2019, and a recurring Visiting Ph.D. Researcher with the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), Cambridge, MA, USA, from 2016 to 2018. She received the Ph.D. degree from the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA), Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2019; the M.A.I. degree from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, in 2014; and the B.Sc. degree from the University of Cincinnati, OH, USA, in 2013. Her primary research interests are swarm intelligence and swarm robotics.