FREVO presented at SASO'12, Lyon

Anita Sobe and Istvan Fehervari are currently at the SASO 2012 in Lyon, the main conference on self-organizing and self-adaptive systems, with approximately 100 attendees. The topics of the talks are very wide spread and therefore the attendees and speakers come from different fields where they apply and analyze various SASO systems.

The first day we attendted the Workshop EVAL4SASO, a special session dedicated for the problem of evaluating such complex SASO systems. Here, we presented our paper:

A. Sobe, I. Fehervari, W. Elmenreich

FREVO: A Tool for Evolving and Evaluating Self-organizing Systems

In IEEE SASO Workshop Eval4SASO, Lyon, France, September 2012

It presents a generic evolutionary framework for rapid prototyping and evaluating research ideas on the design and behavior of evolved complex systems. To illustrate its capabilities, we demonstrated a short demo on a sample problem of dynamic pricing in smart microgrids. FREVO is easy to use and we hope it will assist many researchers and engineers. For further details and downloads, see:

http://frevo.sourceforge.net/

The initial feedback we obtained on the conference was very promising, opening many new possibilities for further joint work in this field. 

To see what is possible with this tool, please check this interesting video on evolving a team of robots playing soccer:

Evolving a team of self-organizing UAVs to address spatial coverage problems

An example for engineering a distributed algorithm using evolutionary methods was presented at the European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2012). The task was to evolve a distributed control algorithm for flying UAV drones to cover an area. The problem of having multiple mobile agents covering (or as we say in robotics, "sweeping") an area is relevant for many applications like lawn mowing, snow removal, floor cleaning, environmental monitoring, communication assistance and several military and security applications. The work by Istvan Fehervari, Wilfried Elmenreich and Evsen Yanmaz describes a simple grid-based abstraction of the problem which was used to test two evolved and one handcrafted control algorithm in comparison to reference algorithms like random walk and random direction.

 Slides (via slideshare):

I. Fehérvári, W. Elmenreich, and E. Yanmaz. Evolving a team of self-organizing UAVs to address spatial coverage problems. In R. M. Bichler, S. Blachfellner, and W. Hofkirchner, editors, European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research Book of Abstracts (ISSN: 2227-7803), Vienna, Austria, April 2012.

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.