event
Thursday 17 Jan 2013: Is Less More? Design Principles for Massively Parallel Robotic Systems
Dr. Roderich Gross - Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield
Harrison 102 14:00-15:00
One of the grand challenges of robotics is the design of robots that are autonomous, in other words, that are capable of dealing with complex situations on their own. This can be crucial when robots have to operate in environments that are unstructured or not easily accessible, such as the inside of a human body or the surface of another planet. I present a series of studies that seek to leverage design principles of natural swarm systems in order to make distributed robotic systems more autonomous. These studies illustrate that exceedingly simple mechanisms found in nature can help produce complex swarm behaviors, which are applicable to a range of problem domains. Moreover, they indicate that swarm-intelligent design might ultimately lead to robotic life-forms that are as adaptive and self-sufficient as living beings.
Biography: Roderich Gross received a Diploma degree (summa cum laude) in computer science in 2001 from Dortmund University of Technology, Germany and the doctoral degree in engineering sciences in 2007 from Universite
Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. From 2005 to 2007 he was a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, a research assistant at the University of Bristol, UK and a Marie Curie Fellow at Unilever R&D Port Sunlight, UK. From 2008 to 2009 he was a Marie Curie Fellow at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Since 2010 he has been a Lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he founded the Natural Robotics Lab. Dr. Gross' research interests include autonomous robots and swarm intelligence. His works have been cited more than 1000 times in the literature according to Google Scholar and his h-index is 20. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Swarm Intelligence and has served as an Associate Editor for the ICRA and IROS conference series.
