CoCoRo : Collective Cognitive Robots
- Members: Jon Timmis, Andy Tyrrell, Mark Read, James Hilder
- Website: http://zool33.uni-graz.at/artlife/node/154/
- Funded by: EU Framework Programme 7
- Start Date: April 2011
CoCoRo is an ambitious project which aims at creating a swarm of interacting, cognitive, autonomous robots. We will develop a swarm of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that are able to interact with each other and which can balance tasks (interactions between/within swarms). These tasks are: ecological monitoring, searching, maintaining, exploring and harvesting resources in underwater habitats. The swarm will maintain swarm integrity under conditions of dynamically changing environments and will therefore require robustness and flexibility. This will be achieved by letting the AUVs interact with each other and exchange information, resulting in a cognitive system that is aware of its environment, of local individual goals and threats and of global swarm-level goals and threats. By a combination of locally acting and globally acting self-organizing schoals, information from the global level flows into the local level and influences the behaviour of individual AUVs. Such a cognitive-based scheme creates a very fast reaction of the whole collective system when optimizing the global performance. As shown by natural swimming fish schoals, such mechanisms are also flexible and scalable. In this way we explore several general principles of swarm-level cognition and can assess their importance in real-world applications. The following scientific questions are to be targeted in the project:
- Can collective cognition be generated as a distributed mechanism without centralized control?
- Is such a collective cognition capable to increase the efficiency of the collective and to increase the robustness of the collective?
- Can such a system of collective cognition be generated from scratch? (Artificial evolution or similar technologies?)
- Can complexity be built from (mathematical) building blocks? Do these building blocks deliver additional complexity "for free"?
- Can simple interacting agents support the emergence a common pre-consciousness; can it evolve from simple to complex?
- Can local interacting agents support the emergence of a global order parameter (in sense of synergy), which in turn enslaves all these local agents?
CoCoRo is an EU-funded (Framework Programme 7) STREP project with a consortium of five Universities participating, including the Universities of Graz, Stuttgart, Brussells and SSCI (Piza). At York, the key focal areas of research will be the use of Artificial Immune System inspired algorithms and development of a fault-tolerant operating system for the platform.
