[Essays]
Foraging Strategies in Nature and Their Application to Swarm Robotics
Date: 22/03/2013
While foraging is a task often experimented with in swarm robotics, it is often the case that foraging strategies inspired by nature are chosen without careful consideration. Foraging strategies including solitary foraging, behavioural matching, stigmergy, signaling to guide others and coordinated and cooperative hunting are identified and their implementation costs in robots, as well as their suitability for different scenarios is discussed.
Does Communication Make a Difference?
Date: 19/04/2010
This paper compares different animal groups from eusocial insect colonies to human society and discusses their mechanics and behaviour as agent systems. The main focus is on interaction between the agents and on how properties of a system like effectiveness or predictability are affected by these interactions.
The Centralised Mindset and Complexity Science
Date: 05/01/2013Humans tend to explain decentralised phenomena as being caused by a single entity. This way of thinking is often referred to as 'the centralised mindset'. Several authors propose that using programming environments where creation of decentralised agent-based systems is easy...
Robot Flocking: Sensors and Control
Date: 04/01/2010
This paper discusses various kinds of robot sensory input, approaches to motor control and ways they could be used for flocking. Focus is put on vision and Gibsonian optic flow that could be utilised by robots with advanced behaviour.
Will is Conscious, but not Free
Date: 04/05/2011The effect of unconscious stimuli on motor actions and emotions is discussed. The nature of human will is examined through review of experiments on correlates of brain activity during volitional actions.
Inner States for Game Agent Systems
Date: 02/06/2009The theoretical part of the project focuses on currently used techniques for obstacle avoidance, task-oriented behaviour and fuzzy logic in the field of games AI. A number of approaches are discussed and evaluated.
Procedural Modelling
Date: 23/05/2008The paper provides an insight into procedural modelling techniques and uses. Procedural modelling is an alternative approach to modelling when high realism and fast real-time rendering of complex objects is desired.
