BRL is a partner in Symbrion, a five-year FP7 FET project led by the Unversity of Stuttgart, which is investigating the principles of how large swarms of robots can evolve and adapt together into different organisms based on bio-inspired approaches.

The aim is to investigate and develop novel principles of behaviour, adaptation and learning for self-assembling robot "organisms" based on artificial evolution and evolutionary computational approaches. The plan is to combine bio-inspired evolutionary paradigms with robot embodiment and swarm-emergent phenomena thus enabling the "organism" to autonomously manage its own hardware and software organization. We hope that such artificial organisms will become self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting from hardware and software points of view. This may lead not only to extremely adaptive, evolvable and scalable robotic systems, but might also enable the robot organisms to reprogram themselves without human supervision; to develop their own cognitive structures and, finally, to allow new functionality to emerge: the most suitable for the given situation.

The scientific and technological objectives are:

Further information:

BRL project lead: Prof Alan Winfield; research associate: Dr Wenguo Liu.