Jonas Kuckling - Training the swarm: Evolution, Discovery, and Role Models

The current rise of digitalization and automation has been widely recognized as the fourth industrial revolution. Robots are taking over more and more tasks, such as automated warehouses, precision agriculture, or environmental monitoring. The use of automated robots offers appealing advantages, such as increased performance and ready availability. As automation advances, an increasing number of robots will need to operate within the same environment. This can lead to bottlenecks in communication and computation capacities, unless the robotic systems are organized in a decentralized fashion. Swarm robotics is one such way to organize decentralized large-scale multi-robot systems. However, this implies that it is no longer possible to program the swarm as a collective system, but that the desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions of the individual robots. The great number of often unpredictable interactions poses one of the main challenges of designing control software for robot swarms. Automated methods, based on artificial intelligence techniques such as evolutionary computation or reinforcement learning, offer a promising alternative to manual design and have shown that they can generate control software that outperforms even that designed by human experts.

In this talk, I will present the research of the newly formed Robot Swarm Learning group on automatically creating control software for robot swarms. In particular, I will be talking about how robot swarms can learn how to perform complex behaviours, using techniques such as automatic modular design, imitation learning or open-ended techniques.

Jonas Kuckling obtained his doctorate from IRIDIA (Université libre de Bruxelles), one of the leading research laboratories in the domain of swarm robotics. During his doctoral studies, he worked on automatic modular design, an approach that combines the advantages of manual and automatic design. From 2023 to 2024, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the cyber-physical systems group at the university of Konstanz. In 2024, he obtained a Nexus grant from the Carl-Zeiss Foundation that allowed him to become a research group leader at the University of Konstanz, starting from October 2024.

Bluesky-Handle: @jonaskuresearch.bsky.social

----------------
The Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour is a Cluster of Excellence funded by the DFG (https://www.dfg.de/en/) and located in the University of Konstanz (https://uni.kn).
----------------
Follow us on social media:
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cbehav.bsky....
----------------
Learn more: https://www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/colle...