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An urban planner might design the spatial layout of transportation amenities so as to improve accessibility for underserved communities -- a fairness objective. However, implementing such a design might trigger processes of neighborhood…
Most policy search algorithms require thousands of training episodes to find an effective policy, which is often infeasible with a physical robot. This survey article focuses on the extreme other end of the spectrum: how can a robot adapt…
Many active systems display nematic order, while interacting with their environment. In this work, we show theoretically how environment-stored memory acts an effective external field that aligns active nematics. The coupling to the…
We investigate the algorithmic problem of uniformly dispersing a swarm of robots in an unknown, gridlike environment. In this setting, our goal is to study the relationships between performance metrics and robot capabilities. We introduce a…
In swarm robotics, just as for an animal swarm in Nature, one of the aims is to reach and maintain a desired configuration. One of the possibilities for the team, to reach this aim, is to see what its neighbours are doing. This approach…
Rewards are sparse in the real world and most of today's reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with such sparsity. One solution to this problem is to allow the agent to create rewards for itself - thus making rewards dense and more…
The spatial segregation of species is fundamental to ecosystem formation and stability. Behavioural strategies may determine where species are located and how their interactions change the local environment arrangement. In response to…
Unraveling patterns of animals' movements is important for understanding the fundamental basics of biogeography, tracking range shifts resulting from climate change, predicting and preventing biological invansions. Many researchers have…
In this paper, we present an integrated solution to memory-efficient environment modeling by an autonomous mobile robot equipped with a laser range-finder. Majority of nowadays approaches to autonomous environment modeling, called…
Highly evolved animals continuously update their knowledge of social factors, refining movement decisions based on both historical and real-time observations. Despite its significance, research on the underlying mechanisms remains limited.…
Colonies of ants are systems of interacting living organisms in which interactions between individuals and their environment can produce a reliable performance of a complex tasks without the need for centralised control. Particularly…
Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…
We solve an adaptive search model where a random walker or L\'evy flight stochastically resets to previously visited sites on a $d$-dimensional lattice containing one trapping site. Due to reinforcement, a phase transition occurs when the…
Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…
Modular robotics research has long been preoccupied with perfecting the modules themselves -- their actuation methods, connectors, controls, communication, and fabrication. This inward focus results, in part, from the complexity of the task…
Social organisms which construct nests consisting of tunnels and chambers necessarily navigate confined and crowded conditions. Unlike low-density collectives like bird flocks and insect swarms, in which hydrodynamic and statistical…
Exploration of indoor environments has recently experienced a significant interest, also thanks to the introduction of deep neural agents built in a hierarchical fashion and trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on simulated…
Time perception is the phenomenological experience of time by an individual. In this paper, we study how to replicate neural mechanisms involved in time perception, allowing robots to take a step towards temporal cognition. Our framework…
To engage in human-like dialogue, robots require the ability to describe the objects, locations, and people in their environment, a capability known as "Referring Expression Generation." As speakers repeatedly refer to similar objects, they…
Random forests are a learning algorithm proposed by Breiman [Mach. Learn. 45 (2001) 5--32] that combines several randomized decision trees and aggregates their predictions by averaging. Despite its wide usage and outstanding practical…