From Collective Behaviors to Swarm Robotics: Artificial Intelligence & Robots

Abstract

Swarm robotics takes inspiration from the collective behaviour observed in nature in many living species, where local interactions between individuals and with the environment lead a group of autonomous agents to solve complex tasks in a distributed manner, without a central control unit. It is a field of research which studies how systems composed of multiple autonomous agents (robots) can be used to accomplish collective tasks, where the tasks either cannot be accomplished by each individual robot alone, or are carried out more effectively by the robots as a group. In this talk, I will describe work addressing interesting problems in swarm robotics that deployed in adversarial scenarios, including robotic herding and robotic trapping. I will also show how collective behaviours of natural species become good inspirations for design of distributed methods in real swarm robotic system (e.g., drone swarm).  

Speaker

Dr Shuai Zhang is currently a Research Fellow in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, supervised by Associate Professor Lyu Chen. Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, supervised by Associate Professor Pan Jia. He received his PhD degree from the Northwestern Polytechnical University, supervised by Professor Liu Mingyong. He was also a Joint PhD student at the University of Strathclyde, UK. His main research interests include swarm/multi-robot systems, distributed control, and robotics and autonomous systems. He has published more than 20 peer reviewed journal/conference papers, including the top-tier specialized journals (e.g., IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), Applied Mathematics and Computation (AMC)), and top international conference (e.g., IROS). As the first author, he published two articles in the same year (2024) in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).