Description

Program Your Own Swarm of (Simulated) Robots

Swarm robotics is the study of multi-robot systems inspired by animal collectives (e.g. ants and bees). One of the main ideas of swarm robotics is that the individual robot behaviours can be quite simple, yet the overall swarm achieves some useful result. The goal of swarm engineering is to design simple individual behaviours so that the overall behaviour achieves some purpose. That purpose might be to gather the robots together, sort objects, or form a desired pattern (e.g. a wall).

A 3-day workshop

During this three-day workshop, participants will develop control programs for a swarm of simulated robots. The programs will be developed using Blockly, a visual programming language. So no previous programming experience is necessary! The Blockly programs will control simulated robots on tasks such as aggregation, synchronized flashing (like fireflies), and sorting objects by colour. Each three-hour session will start with a brief lecture on the concepts and skills necessary to code each task.

Swarm Robotics Lecture

In this lecture, Andrew Vardy will present how we are inspired by this behaviour to design systems of robots that organize objects into desired configurations. Don't miss it!

We value your feedback and welcome any comments you may have to help us improve our programs. Make sure you submit the survey after you have attended this event!