Designing an Emergent System: Collective Construction with Artificial Swarms

by Justin Werfel

New England Complex Systems Institute, Harvard Medical School

Date

Friday, March 6, 2009

Time

3:00 p.m. — 4:00 p.m.

Place

Informatics East (I2), Room 130

Abstract: Social insects build large, complex structures, which emerge through the collective actions of many simple agents acting with no centralized control or preplanning.  Such swarm systems have many desirable features, such as considerable parallelism and robustness to component loss.  However, designing local agent behaviors to achieve a desired global result is in general a serious challenge.  This talk will describe the design and implementation of a system in which autonomous mobile robots collectively build user-specified structures from square building blocks.  Robots act without explicit communication or cooperation, instead using the partially completed structure to coordinate their actions.  Robust, decentralized algorithms let the system provably and reliably build arbitrary desired structures, using only a high-level design as input.

Biography: Justin Werfel is a postdoctoral fellow at the New England Complex Systems Institute and Harvard Medical School.  He completed his Ph.D. in the Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Department at MIT in 2006.  His research interests include swarm robotics, evolutionary theory, programmed self-assembly, collective intelligence, morphogenesis, and biologically-inspired engineering.

Colloquium Provided By:

the School of Informatics