Symbrion is a project funded by European Commissions to develop a framework in which a homogeneous swarm

Swarm

Swarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by animals of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving en masse or migrating in some direction. As a term, swarming is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to...

 of miniature interdependent robots can co-assemble into a larger robotic organism to gain problem-solving momentum. Project duration: 2008 - 2013.

One of the key-aspects of Symbrion is inspired by the biological world: an artificial genome

Genome

In modern molecular biology and genetics, the genome is the entirety of an organism's hereditary information. It is encoded either in DNA or, for many types of virus, in RNA. The genome includes both the genes and the non-coding sequences of the DNA/RNA....

that allows to store and evolve (sub)optimal configurations in order to achieve an increased speed of adaptation.

The SYMBRION project does not start from zero, previous development and research from project I-SWARM and the open-source SWARMROBOT projects serve as a mounting point. A large part of the developments within Symbrion is open-source and open-hardware.

Co-operating universities

• Universität Stuttgart, Germany (Coordination)
• Universität Graz, Austria
• Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands
• Universität Karlsruhe, Germany
• Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, Belgium
• University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
• Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany
• University of York, UK
• Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
• Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, France

External links

• Symbrion homepage