PhD studentship in "Hardware modules for the automatic design of robot swarms"

Kind of position: 
We are currently recruiting a PhD student with a background in mechatronics / electronics engineering / robotics / embedded systems
Institution/Company: 
The DEMIURGE project is hosted by IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
Application deadline: 
Thursday, 2 March, 2017 - 16:30
Country: 
Belgium
City/Place: 
Brussels
Contact e-mail: 
Description of the position: 

DEMIURGE is a research project funded by the European Commission via an ERC Consolidator Grant. The DEMIURGE project is hosted by IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. IRIDIA is a leading laboratory that is world-renowned for its contributions to swarm intelligence, collective robotics, and automatic design/fine-tuning of algorithms.

The scope of the DEMIURGE project is the automatic design of robot swarms. Our goal is to advance the state of the art in swarm robotics by developing the DEMIURGE: an intelligent system that is able to design and realize robot swarms in a totally integrated and automatic way. The DEMIURGE is a novel concept. Starting from requirements expressed in an appropriate specification language, the DEMIURGE will design all aspects of a robot swarm: hardware and control software. It will do so by automatically casting the design problem into an optimization problem and tackling it in a computation-intensive way. The DEMIURGE will not create the design of a robot swarm from scratch: it will operate on a number of preexisting software and hardware modules. It will obtain candidate designs by properly assembling these modules and fine-tuning their parameters.