Swarm Intelligent Systems Research Group at EPFL
Part of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, also known as the EPFL, the Swarm Intelligent Systems Research Group (SWIS) was established on September 23rd, 2003 inside EPFL. The group focuses on research about designs, modeling, control, and optimization methods for self-organized, collectively intelligent distributed system that has exceptional emphasis on multi-robot platforms, sensors and actuator networks, and smart vehicles.
The SWIS Group is also structurally integrated in the Nonlinear Systems Laboratory and is affiliated with the National Center of Competence in Mobile Communication and Information Systems. They have also inherited those of the Collective Robotics research group (CORO) which was established in December of 1999 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, USA.
The teaching mission of this robotic research group is to reinforce the flow of ideas and principles of Swarm Intelligence and to add to the education of a new generation of interdisciplinary engineers and computer scientists.
Part of the research conducted by the SWIS group is in distributed control of intelligent vehicles. This project aims to create a smart vehicle capable of monitoring traffic conditions, contributing to improved traffic flow, warning the driver of a risky situation, and ultimately, the lab hopes that this smart vehicle can take control of the vehicle in emergency scenarios.
They have also developed microscopic and macroscopic modeling methods for swarm robotic systems, which can also be used for traffic systems, and eventually hope they could be used when designing intelligent cars that can perform inter-vehicle communication, have sensory features, and other features that make it a smart vehicle.
This Swiss robotic lab, together with its partners, has also developed algorithms in order to address the issues about distributed boundary coverage. Here, the major concern of is with the sensor coverage of boundaries of things in an environment by a swarm of robots, and has applications in inspection and maintenance of structures.
With this in mind, the SWIS group has developed algorithms that are fully decentralized; ones that need no localization and can even be implemented on a swarm of small robots. In the Distributed Boundary Coverage: From Holonomic Point Robots to Real Robots project, the SWIS group believes that a framework has been developed; one that lets us study systematically deliberative distributed coverage algorithms in more personified simulator webots.
