This site is devoted to a new research initiative in the domain of swarm & collective robot systems - evolutionary robot organisms. This research is supported by European Commission within three Large-Scale Integrated Projects:


The main focus of these projects 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.

The SYMBRION and REPLICATOR projects share common research field and some common problems; synergies between them are exploited in the cross-projects cooperation plan. However both projects also differ in the following essential points:

The SYMBRION and REPLICATOR projects originates from research works within the I-SWARM and especially from the open-source SWARMROBOT projects. The most of technologcal development within the SYMBRION and REPLICATOR are open-source and open-hardware.

This page is also accessible from symbrion.eu and www.replicators.eu.

Featured publications

• "Symbiotic Multi-Robot Organisms: Reliability, Adaptability, Evolution", Springer

• Handbook of Collective Robotics - Fundamentals and Challenges, Pan Stanford Publishing
• "Synergetic Agents - From Multi-Robot Systems to Molecular Robotics", Wiley Press

List of publications related to the Symbrion and Replicator projects

Review Meeting 2013
The agenda for the Review Meeting 2013 (September 25th-27th,2013) is available.

Awards and Events

• 3rd place of the BEST EXHIBITION AWARD, European Future Technologies Conference

• the paper "Towards self-adaptation of robot organisms with a high developmental plasticity" related to SYMBRION and REPLICATOR won the best paper award of the International Conference on Adaptive and Self-adaptive Systems and Applications, ADAPTIVE 2009

Robot3D simulation environment
The Robot3D simulator is now available as an open source project at Ubuntu Launchpad.

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