Robohub.org
ep.

025

podcast
 

Collective coverage and self-assembly with Nikolaus Correll and Roderich Gross

MIT   CSAIL       
by
08 May 2009



share this:

In this episode we look in depth at two shades of robot coordination, multi-robot area coverage and self-assembling robots.

Our first guest, Nikolaus Correll, is a postdoc at MIT in the US. He presents his past research on swarms of minuscule robots to inspect reactor turbines and his latest research on cooperating networks.

Our second guest, Rodrich Gross, will be speaking about his slightly larger swarming robots, or swarm-bots, which are able to join forces to achieve tasks which require strength or large size, by creating a multi-robot organism.

Nikolaus Correll

Nikolaus Correll is a post-doctoral associate at the Distributed Robotics Lab, MIT CSAIL, where he works with Daniela Rus on a wide variety of multi-robot systems. His latest work includes distributed robotic gardens and mobile wireless ad-hoc networks. Besides creating multi-robot systems, Correll has been looking to monitor and control groups of animals such as cow herds and cockroaches in nature.

In this episode, we’ll be looking in depth at the conclusions of his PhD thesis at the EPFL under the supervision of Alcherio Martinoli on how a group of tiny sugar-cube size robots could be used to inspect a jet turbine engine (see video below). Correll will present the trade-offs between having purely reactive robot controllers or robots that plan and how collaboration between the robots affects the performance of the system.



Roderich Gross

Roderich Gross is currently a postdoc at the EPFL. His research interests span computational biology, robotics, and swarm intelligence. His current work, continuing from previous work at the Free Brussels University, focuses on self-assembling robots such as the Swarm-Bots which can attach to each other to form larger robotic systems. This can allow them for example to cross a large gap, go over hills or carry heavy objects in a manner similar to ants (see video below). In this interview Gross describes his research and talks about cooperation, self-assembly and division of labor in robot teams and the potential emergence of artificial life.

Links:


Latest News:

For more information on this week’s news, including Festo’s Robot Penguins, robot theater actors and the interactive disc jockey robot visit the Robots Forum.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum



tags: , ,


Podcast team The ROBOTS Podcast brings you the latest news and views in robotics through its bi-weekly interviews with leaders in the field.
Podcast team The ROBOTS Podcast brings you the latest news and views in robotics through its bi-weekly interviews with leaders in the field.





Related posts :



Interview with Dautzenberg Roman: #IROS2023 Best Paper Award on Mobile Manipulation sponsored by OMRON Sinic X Corp.

The award-winning author describe their work on an aerial robot which can exert large forces onto walls.
19 November 2023, by

Robot Talk Episode 62 – Jorvon Moss

In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Jorvon (Odd-Jayy) Moss from Digikey about making robots at home, and robot design and aesthetics.
17 November 2023, by

California is the robotics capital of the world

In California, robotics technology is a small fish in a much bigger technology pond, and that tends to conceal how important Californian companies are to the robotics revolution.
12 November 2023, by

Robot Talk Episode 61 – Masoumeh Mansouri

In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Masoumeh (Iran) Mansouri from the University of Birmingham about culturally sensitive robots and planning in complex environments.
10 November 2023, by

The 5 levels of Sustainable Robotics

Robots can solve the UN SDGs and not just via the application area.
08 November 2023, by

Using language to give robots a better grasp of an open-ended world

By blending 2D images with foundation models to build 3D feature fields, a new MIT method helps robots understand and manipulate nearby objects with open-ended language prompts.
06 November 2023, by





©2021 - ROBOTS Association


 












©2021 - ROBOTS Association