Towards robust and secure robot swarms

Marco Dorigo (IRIDIA, Belgium), Abstract: Before robot swarms can be deployed in the real world, we need to make them robust to undesired behavior due to the presence of malfunctioning or malicious robots. In the talk, I will first discuss the concept of mergeable nervous system and present experimental results that show how it can be used to design and implement swarms of robots that are easier to control and that can self-repair. I will then discuss how the integration of block chain technology can protect robot swarms from the nefarious effects of the bad behavior of individual robots in the swarm and present results obtained in simulation and with a swarm of pi-puck robots.