This project aims at laying the foundation for engineering the novel class of proprioceptive computing systems. Proprioceptive computing systems collect and maintain information about their state and progress, which enables self-awareness by reasoning about their behaviour, and self-expression by effectively and autonomously adapt their behaviour to changing conditions.  Innovations from EPiCS are based on systematic integration of research in concepts and foundations for self-aware and self-expressive systems with novel hardware/software platform technologies and architectures for engineering autonomic compute nodes and networks. EPiCS drives and validates the research by the requirements of three challenging application domains that cover both high-end computers and embedded systems, as well as embeddings into technical and non-technical contexts.

RECOGNITION

Relevance and cognition for self-awareness in a content-centric Internet (start 2010)

This project will develop on the one hand the concept of cognitive self-awareness at the device, at the artefact and at the system level, as a fundamental property of future ICT systems. This will be based on the cognitive processes that the human species exhibits for self-awareness, seeking to exploit the fact that humans are ultimately the fundamental basis for high performance autonomic processes. On the other hand  RECOGNITION will engage and demonstrate the cognitive self-awareness paradigm for new content-centric functionality.

RECOGNITION website

SAPERE

Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems (start 2010)

The  objective of this project is the development of a highly-innovative theoretical and practical framework for the decentralized deployment and execution of self-aware and adaptive services for future and emerging pervasive network scenarios. The framework will be grounded on a foundational re-thinking of current service models and of associated infrastructures and algorithms. In particular, getting inspiration from natural ecosystems, the project will demonstrate and experiment the possibility of modelling and deploying services as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, and of enforcing self-awareness and autonomic behaviours as inherent properties of the ecosystem, rather than as peculiar characteristics of its individuals only.

SAPERE website

SYMBRION

Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms (2008-2013)

SYMBRION is a project funded under the PerAda Proactive Initiative but is also associated with the AWARENESS Proactive Initiative

The main focus of the SYMBRION project is to investigate and develop novel principles of adaptation and evolution for symbiotic multi-robot organisms based on bio-inspired approaches and modern computing paradigms. Such robot organisms consist of super-large-scale swarms of robots, which can dock with each other and symbiotically share energy and computational resources within a single artificial-life-form. When it is advantageous to do so, these swarm robots can dynamically aggregate into one or many symbiotic organisms and collectively interact with the physical world via a variety of sensors and actuators. The bio-inspired evolutionary paradigms combined with robot embodiment and swarm-emergent phenomena, enable the organisms to autonomously manage their own hardware and software organization. In this way, artificial robotic organisms become self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting from both hardware and software perspectives. This leads not only to extremely adaptive, evolve-able and scalable robotic systems, but also enables robot organisms to reprogram themselves without human supervision and for new, previously unforeseen, functionality to emerge. In addition, different symbiotic organisms may co-evolve and cooperate with each other and with their environment.

SYMBRION website

CoCoRo

Collective Cognitive Robots (2011-2014)

The  CoCoRo project aims to create an autonomous swarm of interacting, cognitive robots. CoCoRo will develop a swarm of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that are able to interact with each other and which can balance tasks. Focal tasks of the CoCoRo-swarms are: ecological monitoring, searching, maintaining, exploring and harvesting resources in underwater habitats. By developing an embodied and distributed system of AUVs, CoCoRo researches the potential of cognition-generating software, which is supported by a suitable hardware concept.

The reason for choosing an underwater scenario is that a robotic system in such an environment faces new challenges that have not yet been solved. The inability to easily access the system in situ requires a high degree of autonomy of the agents. The complex and unpredictable environment requires great flexibility of the system and the three-dimensional mobility of the AUVs requires novel engineering principles and robot control approaches. For this purpose, collective cognitive capabilities derived from animals (e.g. social insect societies) will be used underwater for the first time.

CoCoRo website