Dr. Volker Strobel

Dr. Volker Strobel
IRIDIA
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Av. F. Roosevelt 50
CP 194/6
1050 Brussels
Belgium
email: volker.strobel [at] ulb.be

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Artificial Intelligence lab IRIDIA, working with Prof. Marco Dorigo. My research is funded by an F.R.S.-FNRS research grant that I was awarded for my project Security by design: Preventing attacks on robot swarms.

I investigate the possibilities and limitations of integrating blockchain technology into robot swarms.

I completed my Ph.D. in April 2022 at IRIDIA under the supervision of Prof. Marco Dorigo. My Ph.D. research was funded by an F.R.S.-FNRS Aspirant research fellowship.

My research career began in 2014, when I obtained a B.Sc. degree in Cognitive Science at the University of Tübingen, Germany, followed in 2016 by an M.Sc. degree in Artificial Intelligence at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. During my M.Sc. studies, I was a guest student at TU Delft, Netherlands, where I also completed my M.Sc. thesis.

Download my full CV as PDF (last updated: July 2024)

News

30 September 2024
I just completed a 3-month research stay at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (funded by a HIDA visiting researcher grant), working with Prof. Mario Fritz. For this work, see our LLM2Swarm paper on arXiv.

25 March 2024
Our article Blockchain technology for mobile multi-robot systems by Marco Dorigo, Alexandre Pachecho, Andreagiovanni Reina, and Volker Strobel was published in Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering (free access via this link).

Latest research

NeurIPS Workshop on Open-World Agents (2024)

Volker Strobel, Marco Dorigo, and Mario Fritz

LLM2Swarm: Robot Swarms that Responsively Reason, Plan, and Collaborate through LLMs

Robot swarms are composed of many simple robots that communicate and collaborate to fulfill complex tasks. Robot controllers usually need to be specified by experts on a case-by-case basis via programming code. This process is time-consuming, prone to errors, and unable to take into account all situations that may be encountered during deployment. On the other hand, recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated reasoning and planning capabilities, introduced new ways to interact with and program machines, and incorporate both domain-specific and commonsense knowledge. Hence, we propose to address the aforementioned challenges by integrating LLMs with robot swarms and show the potential in proofs of concept (showcases). For this integration, we explore two approaches. The first approach is 'indirect integration,' where LLMs are used to synthesize and validate the robot controllers. This approach may reduce development time and human error before deployment. Moreover, during deployment, it could be used for on-the-fly creation of new robot behaviors. The second approach is 'direct integration,' where each robot locally executes a separate LLM instance during deployment for robot-robot collaboration and human-swarm interaction. These local LLM instances enable each robot to reason, plan, and collaborate using natural language, as demonstrated in our showcases where the robots are able to detect a variety of anomalies, without prior information about the nature of these anomalies. To enable further research on our mainly conceptual contribution, we release the software and videos for our LLM2Swarm system: this https URL.

Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering (2024)

Blockchain technology for mobile multi-robot systems

Marco Dorigo, Alexandre Pachecho, Andreagiovanni Reina, and Volker Strobel

Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering, Vol 1, Issue 4

Blockchain technology generates and maintains an immutable digital ledger that records transactions between agents interacting in a peer-to-peer network. Initially developed for financial transactions between human agents, the technology could also be used across a broader spectrum of applications, providing transparency, security and trust without the need for a central authority. In this Perspective, we discuss how blockchain technology can enhance mobile multi-robot systems. This enhancement includes ensuring that autonomous robotic agents adhere to applicable laws, are identifiable and accountable for their behaviour, are capable of identifying and neutralizing malfunctioning robots and can actively participate in economic transactions for the exchange of goods and services. Discussing the first applications, we highlight the open challenges and describe the research directions that could reshape the mobile multi-robot research field in the coming decades

Science Robotics (2023)

Robot swarms neutralize harmful Byzantine robots using a blockchain-based token economy

Volker Strobel, Alexandre Pachecho, and Marco Dorigo

Science Robotics, Vol 8, Issue 79
DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abm463 (free access to the full-text version via this link)

In this study, we demonstrate the potential of blockchain technology to secure the coordination of robot swarms. In experiments conducted with both real and simulated robots, we show how blockchain technology enables a robot swarm to neutralize harmful robots without human intervention, thus enabling the deployment of autonomous and safe robot swarms.

Background information

A robot swarm consists of a large number of autonomous robots that exploit self-organization to coordinate their activities and to solve complex problems that are beyond the capabilities of the single robots. Even though the inherent robustness to failure, scalability, and flexibility of a self-organized system makes of robot swarms ideal candidates for a number of real world tasks, current studies have limited their attention to safe laboratory settings and have virtually ignored security issues.

The main goal of my research is to build a secure robot swarm that is scalable to real-world applications. To enable this, I address security issues such as how to certify the swarm behavior and how to make the swarm behavior tamper proof in a fully decentralized way. In the project, the swarm members interact and coordinate via a blockchain, a distributed database first developed in the context of the digital currency Bitcoin. The blockchain is intended to establish a secure communication medium for the robot swarm. Smart contracts—programming code on the blockchain that is automatically executed if a specified event occurs—will introduce unstoppable and secure coordination mechanisms using the Ethereum framework. The project seeks to investigate possibilities and limitations of combining blockchain and swarm robotics technologies to produce secure robot swarms.

I conduct experiments to test robot swarm coordination mechanisms based on smart contracts and blockchains and I analyze the obtained swarm dynamics and evaluate their robustness in a number of different scenarios. My objectives are to identify critical steps in designing secure systems, to show implications of attacker strategies, and to propose solutions to security challenges in swarm robotics.