Cooperative Robotics in IoT Ecosystems
By 2020, more than 13 billion devices are expected to be connected through the IoT, creating a massive data-driven economy and enabling a whole new range of unique services and products. Robots, traditionally stand-alone systems, are quickly moving towards “everything connected” applications, accelerated by the availability of IoT-powered resources like big data, advancements in machine learning and the deployment of distributed cloud computing infrastructure at the network edge.
We are researching novel methods to enhance the sensing, planning and acting capabilities of multi-robot systems in a rich and dense network provided by connected IoT devices and services, including:
- Cognitive computing and semantic reasoning on shared knowledge in the (edge) cloud
- Multi-actor coalition forming and cooperative behaviors
- Adaptive capability reconfiguration through distributed intelligence
- Fog computing for smart manufacturing
- Wearable interactions for joint human-robot problem solving
- Neuromorphic robotic control architectures and controllers
- Cloud-assisted swarm robotics with novel communication paradigms
We are currently focusing on use cases in smart home and office environments and aim to expanding this research into smart cities and infrastructures, as well as specialized scenarios including manufacturing, search and rescue and space.
Staff
Pieter Simoens, Bart Dhoedt
Researchers
Bert Vankeirsbilck, Keshav Chintamani, Yara Khaluf, Christof Mahieu, Helen Harman, Omid Givehchi.
Projects
- ICON WONDER
- ACTHINGS
Key publications
- Internet of Robotic Things: context-aware and personalized interventions of assistive social robots Pieter Simoens, Christof Mahieu, Femke Ongenae, Femke De Backere, Stijn De Pestel, Jelle Nelis and Filip De Turck (Ghent University – iMinds, Belgium); Shirley Elprama, Kilpi Katriina and Jewell Charlotte (Vrije Universiteit Brussel – iMinds, Belgium); An Jacobs (Vrije Universiteit Brussel – iMinds). 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking 3-5 October 2016 // Pisa, Italy
- Middleware Platform for Distributed Applications Incorporating Robots, Sensors and the Cloud Elias De Coninck (Ghent University & iMinds, Belgium); Steven Bohez, Sam Leroux, Tim Verbelen, Bert Vankeirsbilck and Pieter Simoens (Ghent University – iMinds, Belgium); Bart Dhoedt (Ghent University, Belgium) 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking 3-5 October 2016 // Pisa, Italy
- Steven Bohez, Jaron Couvreur, Bart Dhoedt, and Pieter Simoens. 2015. “Cloudlet-based Large-scale 3D Reconstruction Using Real-time Data from Mobile Depth Cameras.” In 6e International Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing and Services, Proceedings, 2015
- Yara Khaluf, et al. Hybrid Societies: Challenges and Perspectives in the Design of Collective Behavior in Self-organizing Systems Frontiers in Robotics and AI, section Computational Intelligence, 2016
