Publications by Dario Floreano

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Cooperation applies the situations where two or more individuals obtain a net benefit by working together. Cooperation is widely spread in nature and takes several forms, ranging from behavioral coordination to sacrifice of one’s own life for the benefit of the group. This latter form of cooperation is known as “true cooperation”, or “altruism”, and is found only in few cases. Truly cooperative robots would be very useful in conditions where unpredictable events may require costly actions by individual robo

The idea of creating collective aerial systems is appealing because several rather simple flying vehicles could join forces to cover a large area in little time in applications such as monitoring, mapping, search and rescue, or airborne communication relay ...

This paper describes the European Commission Framework 7 funded project myCopter (2011-2014). The project is still at an early stage so the paper starts with the current transportation issues faced by developed countries and describes a means to solve them through the use of personal aerial transportation. The concept of personal air vehicles (PAV) is briefly reviewed and how this project intends to tackle the problem from a different perspective described. It is argued that the key reason that many PAV con

Indirect genotype to phenotype mappings in the form of developmental systems may allow better scalability to larger phenotypes in evolvable hardware. This report reviews developmental systems used in evolvable hardware and it proposes a new classifications based on hardware characteristics. It then describes a genetic encoding and developmental system called the morphogenetic system which has been designed for multi-cellular circuits. This morphogenetic system is inspired upon gene expression and cell diffe

Active vision may be useful to perform landmark-based navigation where landmark relationship requires active scanning of the environment. In this article we explore this hypothesis by evolving the neural system controlling vision and behavior of a mobile r ...

This paper is concerned with adaptation capabilities of evolved neural controllers. We propose to evolve mechanisms for parameter self-organization instead of evolving the parameters themselves. The method consists of encoding a set of local adaptation rules that synapses follow while the robot freely moves in the environment. In the experiments presented here, the performance of the robot is measured in environments that are different in significant ways from those used during evolution. The results show t

Flight through cluttered environments, such as forests, poses great challenges for animals and machines alike because even small changes in flight path may lead to collisions with nearby obstacles. When flying along narrow corridors, insects use the magnit ...

This paper describes the European Commission (EC) Framework 7 funded project myCopter (2011-2014). The project is still at an early stage so the paper starts with a discussion of the current transportation issues faced, for example, by European countries and describes a means to solve them through the use of a personal aerial transportation system (PATS). The concept of personal air vehicles (PAVs) is briefly reviewed and how this project intends to tackle the problem described. It is argued that the key re

We aim at developing autonomous miniature hovering flying robots capable of navigating in unstructured GPS-denied environments. A major challenge is the miniaturization of the embedded sensors and processors that allow such platforms to fly by themselves. ...

In this paper we describe the evolution of a discrete-time recurrent neural network to control a real mobile robot. In all our experiments the evolutionary procedure is carried out entirely on the physical robot without human intervention. We show that the autonomous development of a set of behaviors for locating a battery charger and periodically returning to it can be achieved by lifting constraints in the design of the robot/environment interactions that were employed in a preliminary experiment. The eme

Numerous methods have been developed for inference of gene regulatory networks from expression data, however, their strengths and weaknesses remain poorly understood. Accurate and systematic evaluation of these methods is hampered by the difficulty of constructing adequate benchmarks and the lack of tools for a differentiated analysis of network predictions on such benchmarks. We present the new version (3.0) of GeneNetWeaver (GNW), an open-source tool for in silico benchmark generation and performance prof

memory in biological neural networks. Similarly, artificial neural networks could benefit from modulatory dynamics when facing certain types of learning problem. Here we test this hypothesis by introducing modulatory neurons to enhance or dampen neural pla ...

It is argued that competitive co-evolution is a viable methodology for developing truly autonomous and intelligent machines capable of setting their own goals in order to face new and continuously changing challenges. The paper starts giving an introduction to the dynamics of competitive co-evolutionary systems and reviews their relevance from a computational perspective. The method is then applied to two mobile robots, a predator and a prey, which quickly and autonomously develop efficient chase and evasio

We present a new type of robot concept called swarm-bot, based on cooperative and swarm intelligence, that was developed within an interdisciplinary project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies of the European Commission. A swarm-bot is an assembly of several mobile robots (called s-bots), which can operate both autonomously and as a group. The unique feature of the project is that s-bots can exploit physical interconnections to self-assemble into a bigger entity, a swarm-bot, capable of tackli

An aerial vehicle, configured to transport cargo, and including a propulsion system and a foldable cage is described. The foldable cage is substantially linear while in a folded configuration, and substantially circular while in a deployed configuration. M ...

A banked turn is a common flight maneuver observed in birds and aircraft. To initiate the turn, whereas traditional aircraft rely on the wing ailerons, most birds use a variety of asymmetric wing-morphing control techniques to roll their bodies and thus re ...

Perception is needed for action, not for the pure sake of the construction of abstract representations, although it does not exclude the role of internal representations for mediating complex behaviors. We think that, for the purpose of building autonomous robots, active perception requires specific recipes for three related aspects: the design of the physical sensory system, the modality and type of information extracted, and the structure and functioning of the control system. We outline a set of solution

To date, most modular robotic systems lack flexibility when increasing the number of modules due to their hard building blocks and rigid connection mechanisms. In order to improve adaptation to environmental changes, softness on the module level might be b ...

Numerous methods have been developed for inferring gene regulatory networks from expression data, however, both their absolute and comparative performance remain poorly understood. In this paper, we introduce a framework for critical performance assessment of methods for gene network inference. We present an in silico benchmark suite that we provided as a blinded, community-wide challenge within the context of the DREAM (Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods) project. We assess the performa

Modular or multi-cellular robots hold the promise to adapt their morphology to task and environment. However, research in modular robotics has traditionally been limited to mechanically non-adaptive systems due to hard building blocks and rigid connection ...

Dario Floreano

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Methods for Artificial Evolution of Truly Cooperative Robots

Dealing with Mid-Air Collisions in Dense Collective Aerial Systems

myCopter – Enabling Technologies for Personal Aerial Transportation Systems

Hardware morphogenetic developmental system

Evolutionary Active Vision Toward Three Dimensional Landmark-Navigation

Evolution of Adaptive Synapses: Robots with Fast Adaptive Behavior in New Environments

The role of optic flow pooling in insect flight control in cluttered environments

myCopter – Enabling Technologies for Personal Aerial Transportation Systems.

A method for ego-motion estimation in micro-hovering platforms flying in very cluttered environments

Evolution of Homing Navigation in a Real Mobile Robot

GeneNetWeaver 3.0: realistic benchmark generation and performance profiling of network inference methods

Evolutionary Advantages of Neuromodulated Plasticity in Dynamic, Reward- based Scenarios

Competitive Co-Evolutionary Robotics: From Theory to Practice

The cooperation of swarm-bots: physical interactions in collective robotics

Foldable aircraft with protective cage for transportation and transportability

A twist of the tail in turning maneuvers of a bird-inspired feathered drone

Active Perception, Navigation, Homing, and Grasping: An autonomous Perspective

An Active Connection Mechanism for Soft Modular Robots

Revealing strengths and weaknesses of methods for gene network inference

Soft Cell Simulator: A tool to study Soft Multi-Cellular Robots