IRIDIA is the Artificial Intelligence research laboratory of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. It is deeply involved in theoretical and applied research in computational intelligence. Of particular interest here are the research activities in swarm robotics, where IRIDIA researchers have contributed with some pioneering works. In particular, IRIDIA has coordinated two Future and Emerging Technologies (FET-OPEN) projects:
- SWARM-BOTS: Swarms of self-assembling artefacts http://www.swarm-bots.org. The project studied new approaches to the design and implementation of self-organizing and self-assembling artifacts (October 2001 - March 2005).
- Swarmanoid: Towards Humanoid Robotic Swarms http://www.swarmanoid.org. The project goal was the design, implementation and control of a swarmanoid, that is, a novel distributed robotic system made of heterogeneous, dynamically connected, small autonomous robots (October 2006 - September 2010).
More recently, his researchers have received two ERC grants to do research in swarm robotics:
- E-SWARM: Engineering Swarm Intelligence Systems http://www.e-swarm.org. The goal of this ERC Advanced Grant to Marco Dorigo was to develop a rigorous engineering methodology for the design and implementation of artificial swarm intelligence systems (June 2010 - May 2015).
- DEMIURGE: Automatic Design of Robot Swarms http://demiurge.be. The goal of this ERC Consolidator Grant to Mauro Birattari 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 (October 2016 - September 2021).