MEng Mechatronic and Robotic Engineering graduate Gopesh Yadav Dosieah has won an award for best research paper at the 2022 International Conference on Swarm Intelligence.
Gopesh graduated in 2020, receiving both the Fourier Award and the Wiener Award for his outstanding achievements and now works as a graduate software engineer at Dyson.
Alongside his day job, Gopesh has continued to develop the research with the University of Sheffield based on his final year dissertation supervised by Dr Roderich Groß from the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering.
The research paper ‘Moving mixtures of passive and active elements with robots that do not compute’ proposes a model in which a swarm of robots could move both static and live objects to a specific location using robots that do not need to plan, or store information, while performing the task.
Such swarms of robots could eventually be used to better cope with the variety of objects found in many situations, from collecting plastic waste in water to herding animals such as sheep in agriculture.
The research could also be applied to nanomedicine where swarms of robots may be tasked with identifying and moving either static or moving objects in the body.
Gopesh Yadav Dosieah said:
“It still feels like a dream. I never imagined publishing a scientific paper, let alone winning an award. It's an amazing feeling to see the culmination of working on this research paper for more than two years.”
“It would not have been possible without my co-authors Anil Ozdemir, Melvin Gauci and Roderich Groß, and everyone who contributed to this success.”
Dr Roderich Groß said:
“Having robot swarms that effectively move around mixtures of elements could be useful for a range of applications.”
“The underlying problem is particularly challenging if the robots do not know whether the elements are passive or actively moving.”
“We propose a solution to this problem that requires exceedingly limited amounts of information processing on-board the robots. Testing these solutions in practice will be part of future research.”
Other co-authors of the research include Dr Anil Ozdemir, who currently works at Zebra Technologies, and Dr Melvin Gauci, who currently works with Amazon Robotics. Both Melvin and Anil were PhD students at the University of Sheffield.