The MARS Laboratory at the Technion CS Department is dedicated to research on Swarm, or Multi-agent, or Ant Robotics.
Our inspiration comes from observing the emergent behaviors in large groups of “simple” organisms.
According to our paradigm, we usually deal with very simple robotic agents, having restricted sensing and communication capabilities, with limited memory and computational resources.
We analyze, both mathematically and experimentally, via simulations and hardware implementations, the capabilities of such systems to organize themselves into formations, to patrol and cover a region in their environment, or to achieve other interesting collaborative tasks.
We are interested in both direct problems, of analyzing emergent swarm behaviors that arise from a set of given local rules of interaction, and in inverse problems dealing with designing local rules of local inter-agent, and agent-environment interactions, that provably lead to desired global behaviors.