Project name: Animal and robot Societies Self-organise and Integrate by Social Interaction (bees and fish)
Project acronym: ASSISIbf
Dates: 01.02.2013 - 31.07.2018
Total budget: 6 Million EUR
Funding: EU-FP7
Grant Agreement number: 601074
website: zool33.uni-graz.at/artlife/assisibf
ASSISIbf
The main goal of ASSISIbf is to establish a bio-hybrid society of robots and animals (honeybees and fish). Within the project, two novel robotic systems were developed, with built-in abilities to “learn” the social language of animals, and to influence their collective behaviour.
A network of static interactive robot units called CASUs (Combined Actuator Sensor Unit) was developed, capable of producing and sensing a variety of stimuli relevant for honeybee behaviour. The robots implemented into the experimental arena are shown in the figure.
Fish CASUs are designed as mobile robots capable of performing complex dynamic movements and mimicking the intricate behaviour of small live fish species in constrained workspaces.
Distributed control methods using evolutionary computation were developed for the robotic systems, adapting robot behaviour to the observed animal behaviour, thus enabling the establishment of a self-organising bio-hybrid society of robots and animals. Such a society can then then pursue a common goal, which can be defined by human “users” of the system. One of the showcase examples is a graph theory problem solver (dominating set), where animals and robots, enhanced with a human-designed decision algorithm, together search the solution space, yielding a close-to-optimal solution in constant time.
This project is developed by:
- University of Graz – Artificial Life Lab (AT)
- CYBERTRONICA - Research Center of Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science (CH)
- University of Zagreb – Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, LARICS (HR)
- Université Paris Diderot – LIED (FR)
- École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne – LSRO (CH)
- FCiências.ID – Associação para a Investigação e Desenvolvimento de Ciências (PT)
Our professor Stjepan Bogdan went to the AI2FUTURE conference, which was held on 11th and 12th October 2018 at the Algebra LAB in Zagreb, Croatia. He was an invited lecturer and held a presentation titled "Swarm Intelligence in Animal and Robot Societies" based on the recently finished ASSISI project, the research was done as part of it and the findings of the project. We hope to take part in this and other such conferences in the future, too!