Jean-Louis Deneubourg

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

Rafael Botner Barmak, Matthieu Jean-Michel Philippe Broisin, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Robert Matthew Mills, Francesco Mondada, Martina Szopek

In a time marked by ecological decay and by the perspective of a severe backlash of this ecosystem decay and climate devastation onto human society, bold moves that employ novel technology to counteract this decline are required. We present a novel concept of employing Artificial Life technology, in the form of cybernetically enhanced bio-hybrid superorganisms as a countermeasure and as a contingency plan. We describe our general conceptual paradigm, consisting of three interacting action plans, namely: (1) Organismic Augmentation; (2) Bio- Hybrid Socialization and (3) Ecosystem Hacking, which together compose a method to create a novel agent for ecosystem stabilization. We demonstrate, through early results from the research project HIVEOPOLIS, a specific way how classic Artificial Life technologies can create such a living, ecologically active and technologically-augmented superorganism that operates outside in the field. These technologies range from cellular automata and biomimetic robots to novel and sustainable biocompatible materials. Aiming at having a real-world impact on the society that relies on our biosphere is an important aspect in Artificial Life research and is fundamental to our methodology to create a physically embodied and useful form of Artificial Life.

MIT Press2021

Designing a socially integrated mobile robot for ethological research

Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Alexey Gribovskiy, Francesco Mondada

A robot introduced into an animal group, accepted by the animals as conspecifics, and capable of interacting with them is an ecient tool for ethological research, particularly in studies of collective and social behaviour. In this paper, we present the implementation of an autonomous mobile robot developed by the authors to study group behaviour of chicks of the domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus). We discuss the design of the robot and of the experimental framework that we built to run animal-robot experiments. The robot design was experimentally validated, we demonstrated that the robot can be socially integrated into animal groups. The designed system extends the current state of the art in the field of animal-robot interaction in general and the birds study in particular by combining such advantages as (1) the robot being a part of the group, (2) the possibility of mixed multi-robot, multi-animal groups, and (3) close-loop control of robots. It opens new opportunities in the study of behaviour in domestic fowl by using mobile robots; being socially integrated into the animal group, robots can profit from the positive feedback mechanism that plays key roles in animal collective behaviour. They have potential applications in various domains, from pure scientific research to applied areas such as control and ensuring welfare of poultry.

2018

The PoulBot: a mobile robot for ethological studies on domestic chickens

Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Alexey Gribovskiy, Francesco Mondada

This paper presents the ”Mixed Societies of Robots and Vertebrates” project that is carried out by the Mobile Robotics group at EPFL, Switzerland in collaboration with the Unit of Social Ecology at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. The idea of the project is to study behavior in young chicks of the domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) by using mobile robots able to interact with animals and accepted as members of an animal group. In contrast to other studies where relatively simple robotic devices are used to test specific biological hypotheses, we aim to design a multipurpose robot that will allow ethologists to study more sophisticated phenomena by providing a wide range of sensors and sufficient computational power. In this paper we present a PoulBot robot and give an example of the ethological experiment, where it is used to study the social aggregation in chick groups.

2010

Towards Mixed Societies of Chickens and Robots

Hannes Bleuler, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Alexey Gribovskiy, Francesco Mondada

To design, to study, and to control mixed animals-robots societies is a challenging field of scientific exploration that can bring new frameworks to study individual and collective behaviors in animal and mixed robot-animal societies. In the Chicken Robot project we aim at developing a mobile robot, able to collaborate with a group of chicks and to control certain group behaviors. The first research step is to build formal models of relevant animal behaviors by performing ethological experiments. Hence, one of the principal tasks is to design a setup equipped with appropriate monitoring tools. In this paper, we present a toolset for running chick-robot experiments and analyzing results. It includes an autonomous PoulBot robot and an experimental setup, able to autonomously record experimental video and audio data, to detect displacements of chicks and robots, to detect their calling activity and to provide robots with these data. We also present a visual data analysis system to extract behavioral features of individual chicks using the variational Bayesian Gaussian mixture model classification with a particle filters based prediction of future positions of chicks. We show how these tools are currently used to carry out chick-robot experiments, to collect behavioral data and to extract animal behavioral features that allow us to build behavioral models bound to be implemented in the robot.

IEEE Press2010

Social Integration of Robots into Groups of Cockroaches to Control Self-Organized Choices

Masoud Asadpour, Gilles Caprari, Nicolaus Correll, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Alcherio Martinoli, Francesco Mondada, Roland Siegwart

Collective behavior based on self-organization has been shown in group-living animals from insects to vertebrates. These findings have stimulated engineers to investigate approaches for the coordination of autonomous multirobot systems based on self-organization. In this experimental study, we show collective decision-making by mixed groups of cockroaches and socially integrated autonomous robots, leading to shared shelter selection. Individuals, natural or artificial, are perceived as equivalent, and the collective decision emerges from nonlinear feedbacks based on local interactions. Even when in the minority, robots can modulate the collective decision-making process and produce a global pattern not observed in their absence. These results demonstrate the possibility of using intelligent autonomous devices to study and control self-organized behavioral patterns in group-living animals.

2007

SwisTrack: A Tracking Tool for Multi-Unit Robotic and Biological Systems

Nicolaus Correll, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Alcherio Martinoli

Tracking of miniature robotic platforms involves major challenges in image recognition and data association. We present our 3-year effort into developing the platform-independent, easy-to-use, and robust tracking software SwisTrack, which is tailored to research in swarm robotics and behavioral biology. We demonstrate the software and algorithms abilities using two case studies, tracking of a swarm of cockroaches, and a swarm-robotic inspection task, while outlining hard problems in tracking and data-association of marker-less objects. Tracking accuracy of a moving robot with respect to camera noise and the calibration model are calculated experimentally. Its open, platform-independent architecture, and easy-to-use interfaces (MatlabTM, JavaTM, and C++), allowing for (distributed) post-processing of trajectory data online, make the software highly adaptive to particular research projects without changes to the source code. SwisTrack is publicly available on Sourceforge.net under the OSI Adaptive License and contributions from the robotics and biology community are encouraged.

2006

Evolving Self-Organizing Behaviors for a Swarm-bot

Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Dario Floreano, Luca Maria Gambardella, Roderich Gross, Francesco Mondada

In this paper, we introduce a self-assembling and self-organizing artifact, called a swarm-bot, composed of a swarm of s-bots, mobile robots with the ability to connect to and to disconnect from each other. We discuss the challenges involved in controlling a swarm-bot and address the problem of synthesizing controllers for the swarm-bot using artificial evolution. Specifically, we study aggregation and coordinated motion of the swarm-bot using a physics-based simulation of the system. Experiments, using a simplified simulation model of the s-bots, show that evolution can discover simple but effective controllers for both the aggregation and the coordinated motion of the swarm-bot. Analysis of the evolved controllers shows that they have properties of scalability, that is, they continue to be effective for larger group sizes, and of generality, that is, they produce similar behaviors for configurations different from those they were originally evolved for. The portability of the evolved controllers to real s-bots is tested using a detailed simulation model which has been validated against the real s-bots in a companion paper in this same special issue.

2004

The SWARM-BOTS project

Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Dario Floreano, Luca Maria Gambardella, Roderich Gross, Francesco Mondada

This paper provides an overview of the SWARM-BOTS project, a robotic project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Community (IST-2000-31010). The paper illustrates the robot hardware, and the results of experimental works in which distributed adaptive controllers are designed to allow the agents to perform a variety of tasks which require cooperation and coordination among the members of a group.

Springer Verlag2004

Jean-Louis Deneubourg

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

Designing a socially integrated mobile robot for ethological research

A general methodology for the control of mixed natural-artificial societies

Building a safe robot for behavioral biology experiments

The PoulBot: a mobile robot for ethological studies on domestic chickens

Towards Mixed Societies of Chickens and Robots

Social Integration of Robots into Groups of Cockroaches to Control Self-Organized Choices

SwisTrack: A Tracking Tool for Multi-Unit Robotic and Biological Systems

Evolving Self-Organizing Behaviors for a Swarm-bot

The SWARM-BOTS project

The PoulBot: a mobile robot for ethological studies on domestic chickens

Designing a socially integrated mobile robot for ethological research

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

A general methodology for the control of mixed natural-artificial societies

Building a safe robot for behavioral biology experiments

SwisTrack: A Tracking Tool for Multi-Unit Robotic and Biological Systems

Towards Mixed Societies of Chickens and Robots

Social Integration of Robots into Groups of Cockroaches to Control Self-Organized Choices

Evolving Self-Organizing Behaviors for a Swarm-bot

The SWARM-BOTS project