UKRI AI CDT in Dependable and Deployable AI for Robotics (CDT-D2AIR)

Alexander Wickham

Project
The Development of Heterogenous Swarms to Perform Multi-Task Optimisation

Summary
I am working on developing Heterogenous Swarm Systems that are able replicate the behaviours of biological self-organisation. When considering the different components of swarm robotics the following needs to be considered including verification, communication, localization and flexibility/robustness. When discussing robustness, we need to consider the need for the system to cope with drastic changes to the environment and still function. I am currently looking into multiple different ways of going about this. This includes large scale re-enforcement learning, quality diversity methods to produce large scale learning rates for large amount of agents within a swarm, developing an system of push-phase system to move objects into desired and continuing to develop this into a more abstract fashion.

Lead Institution
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Supervisors
Michael Herrmann (University of Edinburgh), Michael Lones (Heriot-Watt University), Barbara Webb (University of Edinburgh)