Robotics weekly meetings
Purpose
- Community. Keep everyone updated as to what other work is going on in the lab
- Research. Cross germination. Get feedback. Get help on problems. Get ideas.
- Admin. Lab administration.
Format
- Presentation & Discussion (30 - 50 mins)
- Work you have been doing
- Reading you have been doing in the context of your work
- Other reading on something you are passionate about
- Swarmanoid internal meeting (0 - 50 mins)
Try and make your session as involving as possible for everyone:
- Send round material to be read beforehand.
- Ask people before the meeting what aspects of your work / reading they would like to know about or discuss.
- Think about implications of what you are presenting for the research direction of the lab as a whole - methodologies, technologies etc.
Timing & Attendance
The weekly meetings take place on
Unless:
- A given Wednesday is a public holiday, or
- Something very important (like a Ph.D. defense) is overlapping.
If either should happen the meeting is postponed to the next day.
Please indicate on this wiki page if you are not going to be able to attend a meeting (no later than the Friday before).
If you forget to note your absence in advance you will be severely punished and will be forced to buy a nice, big cake for the following meeting.
Previous Meetings
See Minutes and agendas from previous meetings (2007-2008).
See Minutes and agendas from previous meetings (older).
Wednesday 4th February 2009 - Internal Meeting - Room C2-223, 2nd floor
Agenda
- Presentation
- None
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
- Swarmanoid Project: Camera Segmentation Software
Reading material
People who will be absent
Wednesday 11th February 2009 - Giovanni - Room C2-223, 2nd floor
Agenda
- Presentation
- Interference Reduction through Task Partitioning
The talk is about the use of task partitioning as a way to reduce interference in a spatially constrained harvesting task. Interference is one of the key problems in large cooperating groups. We present a simple method to allocate individuals of a robotic swarm to a partitioned task, and study how this task partition can increase system performance by reducing sources of interference. The method is experimentally studied, both in an environment with a constrained area and an environment without the constraint.
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
- Swarmanoid Project: To be defined
Reading material
People who will be absent
Wednesday 18th February 2009 - Carlo - Meeting room in Architecture Dept.
Agenda
- Presentation
- Heterogeneous Group Size Regulation (please edit)
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
- Swarmanoid Project: To be defined
Reading material
People who will be absent
Wednesday 25th February 2009 - Meeting Suspended - Room C2-223, 2nd floor
Wednesday 4th March 2009 - Meeting Suspended - Room C2-223 , 2nd floor
Wednesday 11th March 2009 - Rehan - Room C2-223 , 2nd floor - Start at 16.30
Agenda
- Presentation
- Morphogenesis (please edit)
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
- Swarmanoid Project: To be defined
Reading material
People who will be absent
Thursday 19th March 2009 - Eliseo and Nithin - Paduart Room, 4th floor - Start at 16.30
Agenda
- Presentation
- Phat-bot Assembly and Navigation
- The behavioral toolkit
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
- Swarmanoid Project: To be defined
Abstract: In this talk we will present the work we have been doing on the phat-bot assembly and navigation. All the controllers were implemented with a new architecture in mind, which made the modularity of the behaviors possible in ARGoS. We call this architecture "Behavioral Toolkit" and we will present it also during the talk.
Reading material
People who will be absent
Wednesday 25th March 2009 - Marco - Paduart Room, 4th floor - Start at 16.30
Agenda
- Presentation
- Local social influence mechanisms for collective decision making: A swarm robotics experiment
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
Abstract: In human societies, groups are often perceived as superior decision making entities than individuals. When an important decision has to be made, groups are formed to decide on the issue. Examples include referenda, elections, and juries. When individuals are part of a decision making group, they are subject to social influences that can affect their perception and/or their opinion on the issue. Our work is inspired by this fact and we investigate whether local social influence mechanisms can make a population of robots choose the best of two competing alternatives.
In our experiment, a swarm of robots is faced with a binary decision problem: go foraging to the left, or to the right; or push or pull a family of objects, for example. Associated to each choice there is a cost which is the time it takes for a group to perform the task. I will show you preliminary results that suggest that simple local decision rules can make an uninformed population (or even a negatively biased one) choose the best strategy (in terms of task completion time).
Reading material
People who will be absent
Wednesday 1st April 2009 - Simulator staff - Room C2-223 , 2nd floor, 15:00 - 17:00
Agenda
- Presentation
- None
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
- Technical meeting with the simulator staff
Reading material
People who will be absent
Tuesday 7th April 2009 - Everybody - Room C2-223 , 2nd floor, 14:00 - 16:00
Agenda
- Presentation
- TBA
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
- The simulator
- The Simulator Constitution
- ARGoS BT scripting discussion follow-up
- The BT exposed
- The simulator
Reading material
People who will be absent
Wednesday 15th April 2009 - Antal - Room C2-223 , 2nd floor, 15:00 - 17:00
Agenda
- Presentation
- TBA
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
Reading material
People who will be absent
Wednesday 22nd April 2009 - Manuele - Room C2-223 , 2nd floor, 15:00 - 17:00
Agenda
- Presentation
- A Reliable Distributed Algorithm for Group Size Estimation with Minimal Communication Requirements
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
Reading material
People who will be absent
Wednesday 29th April 2009 - Alex - Room C2-223 , 2nd floor, 15:00 - 17:00
Agenda
- Presentation
- TBA
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
Reading material
People who will be absent
Wednesday 6th May 2009 - Ali - Room C2-223 , 2nd floor, 15:00 - 17:00
Agenda
- Presentation
- TBA
- Internal Meeting / Discussion
Reading material
People who will be absent
