Evolving self-organizing systems - complexity on the workbench

This talk was given by István Fehérvári at FET 2011 in the science café. The tool presented in the talk, FREVO , is a flexible framework open to new components and simulations. It is available as open source at http://www.frevotool.tk.

Heading for the European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS 2012) in Vienna

The European Conference on Complex Systems (ECCS 2012) is an event bringing together 600 researchers in the area of complex and self-organizing systems. Two of them are István and me, presenting our poster on a comparison of evolutionary and ant colonization algorithms.

We are looking forward to an interesting conference, see the program at ECCS'12 website.
The conference runs from September 12 to 16. Our presentation is on Friday, by the way :-)

e-puck solving a maze

As a result from Rene's and Kevin's work, we can show a maze-solving application for an e-puck. The approach has been implemented on real hardware and tested in a simulation using Webots. To solve the task, different sensors of the e-puck (IR-Light Sensor, Distance Sensor, ...) have been combined, so that the e-puck could solve this maze. The robot follows the right wall, until he finds its goal (a dark sector in the maze) - then the LEDs are blinking and it makes a sound, so you notice, it has finished.

As you can see in the video, the approach works (though the robot is moving a bit slowly); also the simulation predicts very similar results.

First e-puck test with a follower application

An e-puck is a small differential-wheeled robot. The openness of the design makes the e-puck especially interesting for academic use. The hardware and software is under an open source license which allows for modifictaion and redistribution of the design. Besides being cute, e-pucks offer a lot of sensory functions and allow us to do hands-on experiments on collaborative robot algorithms.

The video shows a simple follower application, which we used to test the robot. The e-puck is using its sensors to follow an object - in this case the engineer's hand.
Thanks to Rene and Kevin for making this video.