Stéphane Magnenat
The NewScientist article Robot swarms “evolve” effective communication said
Robots that artificially evolve ways to communicate with one another have been demonstrated by Swiss researchers. The experiments suggest that simulated evolution could be a useful tool for those designing of swarms of robots.
Roboticists Dario Floreano, Sara Mitri, and Stéphane Magnenat at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne collaborated with biologist Laurent Keller from the University of Lausanne.
They first evolved colonies of robots in software then tested different strategies on real bots, called s-bots. Both simulated and real robots were set loose in an arena containing two types of objects — one classified as “food” and another designated “poison” — both lit up red.
Each bot had a built-in attraction to food and aversion to poison. They also have a randomly-generated set of parameters, dubbed “genomes” that define the way they move, process sensory information, and how they flash their own blue lights.
Stéphane Magnenat is a PhD student doing research
in mobile robotics. He loves the complexity of the universe,
the knowledge we have acquired
and structured as a species. He strongly believes that information
should be free, that our technologies
will reveal their true powers once people stop trying to “protect” and
reduce access to valuable information, such as computer program source
code, encyclopedias, teaching material, and artistic creations.
For those reasons, he’s very interested in Wikipedia and its
sister projects.
Stéphane coauthored
Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Communication in
Robots,
Division of labor and colony efficiency in social insects: effects
of
interactions between genetic architecture, colony kin structure and
rate of perturbations,
Superlinear Physical Performances in a SWARM-BOT,
Emergence of signaling in colonies of simulated mobile
robots,
From S-bot to Swarmbot & Ishtar, an architecture for robotic control
and monitoring,
Ontogenèae (French), and
De la nésessité des logiciels libres dans
l’application
de
la démocratie
en Suisse (French).
Read his
full list of publications!
He authored
Enki, a fast 2D physics-based robot simulator. It is able to
simulate
cinematics, collisions, sensors and cameras of robots evolving on a
flat surface. It also provides limited support for friction. It is able
to simulate groups of robots hundred times faster than realtime on a
modern desktop computer.
He coauthored
Teem, a software framework that allows for easy creation and
execution of evolutionary robotics experiments. Using a modular
approach, it provides several genomes, evolution logics, neural
networks topologies and neurons/synapses as well as sample experiments.
It seamlessly integrates with the Enki simulator.
He coauthored
Osqoop, an open source software oscilloscope. It
features an
arbitrary number of channels and long acquisition durations. Signal
processing and external peripherals control is possible through a
plugin architecture. Data sources are plugins as well.
He coauthored
NanoC, a simple compiler for a subset of C for the PIC
microcontroller. It takes an input in NanoC and produces CALM assembly
source in output.
He also coauthored
PICsim, a simple PIC debugger. It can load an object file and
the
corresponding CALM assembly source code. Then it can set breakpoint,
examine registers, do step by step. Its architecture is extensible for
newer PIC.
Read his
full list of open source software!
