Speaker topic 2:
Morphogenetic Self-Organization of Swarm Robotic Systems for Robust Boundary Coverage and Target Tracking
Speaker: Yaochu Jin, NICE, Department of Computing, University of Surrey, UK
Abstract: Embryonic development of multi-cellular organisms, also known as morphogenesis, is considered to be a robust self-organization process for pattern generation. Inspired by the recent findings in systems biology indicating that morphogen gradients, together with a gene regulatory network (GRN), plays a key role in biological patterning, we propose a morphogenetic framework for self-organized multi-robot pattern formation and boundary coverage. The proposed framework does not need a global coordinate system and is able to construct arbitrary 2D or 3D shapes, which makes it more powerful for complex pattern construction. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical GRN (H-GRN) for adaptive multi-robot pattern formation in changing environments. The H-GRN consists of two-layers, where the first layer is responsible for adaptive pattern generation for a given environment, whilst the second layer is a decentralized control mechanism that drives the robots onto the pattern generated by the first layer.
Single and multi-objective evolutionary algorithms are employed to optimize the parameters in the GRNs to reduce the time for the robots to converge to the target shape, and to minimize the distance the robots need to travel in pattern formation. Both simulations and proof-of-concept experiments using e-Puck robots have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the morphogenetic self-organization framework. The system is also shown to be robust to partial system failures and environmental changes.
Biography of Yaochu Jin
Yaochu Jin is currently a Professor and Chair in Computational Intelligence, Department of Computing, University of Surrey, UK. His research interests range from computational intelligence to computational neuroscience and computational systems biology. He has (co)authored over 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers.
Professor Jin presently chairs the Intelligent Systems Applications Technical Committee of the IEEE CIS. He is the Program Chair of 2013 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2013), and General Chair of the 2012 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. He was Co-Chair of 2011 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments, Co-Chair of the 2007, 2009 and 2011 IEEE Symposium on Multi-Criterion Decision-Making, He is the Area Co-Chair of FUZZ-IEEE 2011 and Tutorial Chair of CEC 2007 and CEC 2010.
Professor Jin is an Associate Editor of BioSystems, the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, the IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience,and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. He is an Area Editor of the Soft Computing Journal. He has delivered several Invited Plenary. Keynote Speaker at international conferences on various topics, including modeling and analysis of gene regulatory networks, multi-objective machine learning, computational modeling of neural development, morphogenetic robotics and evolutionary aerodynamic design optimization.
Professor Jin is a Fellow of BCS and Senior Member of IEEE.
