ISF Smart Swarms Center

The ISF Smart Swarms Center is a collaborative large-scale research project by Profs. Kaminka (Bar Ilan University, coordinator), Ayali (Tel Aviv University), Bruckstein (Technion), and Agmon (Bar Ilan University). The goal of the center is to conduct synergistic research in biology, robotics, artificial intelligence and distributed algorithms, all focused on swarms. There are multiple research topics being investigated in parallel in this large-scale effort. Click on the link above to visit the common web site for the center.

A common research platform being developed as part of this project involves the use of mixed robot- and live animal- swarms, in order to facilitate discovery of new results in biology and robotics. Specifically, we will be devleoping robots that co-exist in lab experiments with locusts. The robot designs and software will be open-source.

The MAVERICK group is conducting research within the center on rationality in swarms, building off earlier results that show that robot swarms may act rationally, in the sense that the swarm converges to a local-maximum Nash equilibrium, despite each of the robots not knowing anything about the tasks, goals, or actions of the other robots.

To learn more about this research, please see the following publication:

• Yinon Douchan and Gal A. Kaminka. Swarms Can be Rational. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2019.

Or, watch the following presentation from my invited talk on heterogeneous swarms, at the RSS Workshop on Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Task Allocation and Coordination: