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CoSMoS is building capacity in generic modelling and simulation tools and techniques for complex systems. Full details of the project are in the project summary. Collaborating on this project are the Universities of York and Kent with further assistance from the University of Abertay Dundee and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. CoSMoS is funded by EPSRC and with additional support from Microsoft Research. We are pleased to announce the programme for the 4th CoSMoS workshop is now available. The workshop will be taking place in Paris on 8th August 2011 as satellite workshop of ECAL 2011. Sometimes it is called upon us robot types to demonstrate our cool research to people outside the university. For just such an occasion I wrote a little program, inspired by firefly behaviour, which makes the robots flash and synchronise their flashes with other robots. The algorithm that the robots run to achieve synchronised flashing is an implementation of some work done in IRIDIA at the Université libre de Bruxelles [1]. I even made a YouTube video explaining the firefly code and swarm robotics in general!
In the interests of open science, I’ve made the source code for my demonstration available on github, at the following address [1] Anders Lyhne Christensen, Rehan O’Grady, and Marco Dorigo. 2009. From fireflies to fault-tolerant swarms of robots. Trans. Evol. Comp 13(4) (August 2009), 754-766. If you are planning to contribute to our 2011 workshop, you now have a bit longer to finish your submission! Deadline for submission has been extended until April 13, please see our 2011 workshop page for more details. At a recent CoSMoS meeting we had the pleasure of learning more about the fascinating topic of open science and public engagement from Ann Grand, a PhD student at the University of the West of England. As part of her research, Ann is interested in why people (you!) visit open science-type project websites. If you would like to give some feedback, please click here to take a short survey. There are some exciting developments afoot in the world of CoSMoS. We have bought 5 Makerbot “thing-o-matic” 3d printers, and they’re due to arrive in the next week or two! That’s two “thing-o-matics” for the University of York and one each the for University of Kent, Abertay University and the Bristol Robotics Lab. This is exciting because, well… it’s a nifty toy! We can use it to print out all kinds of exciting stuff from the thingverse. For things more relevant to our actual work at CoSMoS we can also use it to do stuff like build custom parts for the epucks and experiment with robot morphology. So far our ideas include: antenna stalks for extending an epuck’s sensors fractal chocolate printing a swarm of hexapod robots such as these or this monster! In anticipation of our new printers I’ve made a printable 3D model [...] |
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