Are Robot Swarms Like Brains?
I have recently explored a way of measuring how information flows within a robot swarm. I think that there is something intriguing behind this idea - a swarm's resemblance to the human brain.
Lots of Robots at IROS in Germany
I have just returned from the IROS conference that took place in Hamburg, Germany. The conference name stands for Intelligent Robots and Systems and it was a huge event full of talks and exhibitions about robotics. While the atmosphere was very professional, the spirit of Oktoberfest, a traditional German celebration of beer and German culture that happens between September and October, managed to blend in very well.
Information Flow Principles for Plasticity in Robot Swarms
An important characteristic of a robot swarm that must operate in the real world is the ability to cope with changeable environments by exhibiting behavioural plasticity at the collective level. In this paper, we report on simulation experiments with homogeneous foraging robot teams and show that analysing swarm behaviour in terms of information flow can help us to identify whether a particular behavioural strategy is likely to exhibit useful swarm plasticity in response to dynamic environments.
Impressions from ALIFE 14 New York
This summer, I attended the Artificial Life conference in New York. There were some interesting and not-so-interesting talks, but generally I am very glad I went. I had a chance to meet some great people and more importantly, to get much needed feedback on my own research. I also got offered to try out real robots in my research.
pyCreeper
The main purpose of pyCreeper is to wrap tens of lines of python code, required to produce graphs that look good for a publication, into functions. It takes away your need to understand various quirks of matplotlib and gives you back ready-to-use and well-documented code.
Novelty detection with robots using the Grow-When-Required Neural Network
The Grow-When-Required Neural Network implementation in simulated robot experiments using the ARGoS robot simulator.
