Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics

A Swarm intelligent system is composed by a large number of autonomous agents, which can be living beings (such as ants or honeybees) or human-built robots, that act together in a self-organized manner. Complex macroscopic behaviors can be observed in swarm systems, which derive by local interactions between the agents or interactions of the agents with the environment.
The focus of my PhD will be to study and design Collective Decision Making mechanisms and apply them to swarms of physically simple robots, in order to analyze how the collaborative mechanisms can overcome the limitations of the simple agents of the swarm in order to solve problems beyond the capabilities of the single agent.

I am currently working with the Kilogrid, a virtualization environment for the Kilobot robots. You can check out the website here