Welcome to the Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab. of the CSE Department at IITG!
We envisage this Lab. to be home to enthusiastic practical researchers in real-world bio-inspired robotics. We believe only in actual implementations and try to ward ourselves from simulations and closed world scenarios – flaws that lead to the decline of the classical (theoretical) AI. This lab. is funded by the FIST programme of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India.
The main research focus is to build an Artificial Being (ABe) which unlike humanoid robots, is a congregation of networked mobile robots emulating the various parts/organs of a body. The ABe is still in the making and when done will manifest in the form of a small group of wireless mobile robots that maintain their integrity, connections, spread out, re-group, share intelligence autonomously and even interface with human beings and comprehend their emotions. Information and hence intelligence is shared using autonomous mobile agents that knit through these robots, serving them based on demand. These heterogeneous agents act distributedly, cloning as and when required to hasten information flow while at the same time controlling their population within the network in a stigmergic manner thus saving on precious bandwidth.
Mechanisms for agent mobility amongst networked robots that request information using pheromone diffusion (not to be confused with theoretical ACO model) and stigmergy based clonal population control have been tested and implemented. Learning using AIS and behaviour arbitration using emotion recognition and generation fall in the current research agenda.
The research has yielded other valuable side-products which include-
- PherCon-C: A mechanism for mobile agent migration to realize a cyberphysical Internet of Things (IoT)
- Typhon†: A Mobile Agent Platform (MAP) running on LPA Prolog’s Chimera Agent System which supports several features for mobility, dynamic code alterability, network management, partial security, etc.
- Lego Interface: LPA Prolog interface for Lego NXT robots which allows for real world control of robots using Prolog/Typhon.
- Simulators: Mobile agent simulators to carry out studies on algorithms for agent mobility in both static and dynamic networks.
Key Investigators:
†Not to be confused with typhoon! In Greek mythology, Typhon is known to be the father of all monsters, including Chimera.