European Union FP7-ICT programme, Large Project, Contract No: 216240

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The REPLICATOR project started in March 2008 under the European Union's 7th framework programme, in the theme of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It involves the co-operation of 10 leading academic organisations throughout Europe and has a total value of the award by the EU is €5.5 million. The project will end in February 2013.

The REPLICATOR project originates from previous research work within the I-SWARM project as well as from the open-source SWARMROBOT project. The project focuses on the development of an advanced robotic system, consisting of a swarm of small autonomous mobile micro-robots that are capable of self-assembling into large artificial organisms. These robotic organisms possess common energy and information buses as well as reliable legged, wheeled or climbing locomotion, based on modular sub-systems which can be autonomously reconfigured. Owing to the heterogeneity of the elementary robots and their capability to share resources and communicate, the robotic organisms are able to achieve large computational power and make use of close- and far-range sensing. The energy is autonomously harvested from external power sources.

The main goal of the project is to develop novel principles underlying these robotic organisms, such as self-configuration, self-adjustment and self-learning. The bio-inspired evolutionary approach and evolvable hardware structure adopted in this project enable the robotic organisms to emerge with new functionalities, to develop their own cognitive and control structures and, finally, to work autonomously in uncertain situations without any human supervision. Ultimately, these robotic organisms, which are extremely adaptive, robust, scalable and rich in sensing and actuating capabilities, will be used to build autonomous sensor networks, capable of self-spreading and self-maintaining in open-ended, even hazardous, environments.

MMVL Replicator team

Project leader - Dr Fabio Caparrelli, embedded vision systems

Research staff

• Dr Salah Karout, machine vision software, distributed image processing
• Dr Stephen McKibbin, adaptive learning, sensor fusion

Project partners

Co-ordinator - Universitaet Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems (USTUTT), Stuttgart, Germany.

Academic partners

• Karl-Franzens-Universitaet Graz, Institute of Zoology (IZG), Graz, Austria
• Sheffield Hallam University, Microsystems and Machine Vision Lab, Sheffield, United Kingdom
• Universitaet Karlsruhe (TH), Institute for Process Control and Robotics (UNIKARL), Karlsruhe, Germany
• Scuola Superiore di Sant'Anna, Center of Research In Microengineering (SSSA), Pisa, Italy
• Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering (FhG) St. Ingbert, Germany
• Institute of Microelectronic Applications s.r.o., Department of Telematics, Prague, Czech Republic
• Ubisense Ltd., United Kingdom
• Almende BV, Rotterdam, Netherlands
• Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic