Dr Roderich Gross
PhD, SMIEEE, MACM
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Computational Intelligence
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+44 114 222 5610
Full contact details
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Amy Johnson Building
Portobello Street
Sheffield
S1 3JD
- Profile
-
I am a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Scientist at CSAIL, MIT, and an Executive Committee Member of Sheffield Robotics, where I lead the Enabling Technologies theme. I received a Ph.D. degree in engineering science in 2007 from Université libre de Bruxelles, and was a JSPS Fellow (Tokyo Institute of Technology), a Research Associate (University of Bristol), and a Marie Curie Fellow (EPFL & Unilever). My research interests are in robotics and artificial intelligence. I have made contributions to the coordination of robot swarms and reconfigurable robots, and invented a machine learning method called Turing Learning. I served as the General Chair of DARS 2016 and as an Editor of IROS 2015-18. Currently, I serve as an Associate Editor of Swarm Intelligence, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, and ICRA 2019.
- Research interests
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- swarm robotics, self-reconfigurable robots, multi-robot coordination, collaborative robots
- robotics software/tools (human-robot interaction interfaces, formal design tools, operating systems)
- machine learning for behavior inference (Turing Learning, generative adversarial networks)
- autonomous systems and decision making
- natural computing (swarm intelligence, evolutionary algorithms, artificial life)
- Publications
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Edited books
- Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, 12th Annual Conference, TAROS 2011. Springer Verlag.
Journal articles
- Coherent movement of error-prone individuals through mechanical coupling. Nature Communications, 14. View this article in WRRO
- Mean-shift exploration in shape assembly of robot swarms.. Nat Commun, 14(1), 3476.
- Biologically inspired herding of animal groups by robots. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14(2), 478-486.
- Aerobatic tic-toc control of planar quadcopters via reinforcement learning. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 7(2), 2140-2147.
- Control of centrally-powered variable pitch propeller quadcopters subject to propeller faults. Aerospace Science and Technology, 120.
- Modular fluidic propulsion robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 37(2), 532-549.
- Sparse robot swarms: Moving swarms to real-world applications. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7.
- Controllability analysis and controller design for variable‐pitch propeller quadcopters with one propeller failure. Advanced Control for Applications, 2(2).
- SwarmCom: an infra-red-based mobile ad-hoc network for severely constrained robots. AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS, 44(1), 93-114.
- Guest editorial: Special issue on distributed robotics - from fundamentals to applications. Autonomous Robots, 42(8), 1521-1523.
- Finding Consensus Without Computation. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(3), 1346-1353.
- Control of synchronization regimes in networks of mobile interacting agents. Physical Review Applied, 7(5).
- Turing learning: a metric-free approach to inferring behavior and its application to swarms. Swarm Intelligence, 10(3), 211-243.
- Supervisory control theory applied to swarm robotics. SWARM INTELLIGENCE, 10(1), 65-97.
- A Self-Organising Model of Thermoregulatory Huddling.. PLoS Comput Biol, 11(9), e1004283.
- Occlusion-Based Cooperative Transport with a Swarm of Miniature Mobile Robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 31(2), 307-321.
- Self-organized aggregation without computation. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ROBOTICS RESEARCH, 33(8), 1145-1161.
- ANTS 2012 special issue. SWARM INTELLIGENCE, 7(2-3), 79-81.
- Why 'GSA: a gravitational search algorithm' is not genuinely based on the law of gravity. NATURAL COMPUTING, 11(4), 719-720.
- TAROS2011. ROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS, 60(11), 1355-1355.
- ANTS 2010 special issue. SWARM INTELLIGENCE, 5(3-4), 143-147.
- From swarm robotics to smart materials. NEURAL COMPUT APPL, 19(6), 785-786.
- Self-assembly strategies in a group of autonomous mobile robots. AUTON ROBOT, 28(4), 439-455.
- Teamwork in Self-Organized Robot Colonies. IEEE T EVOLUT COMPUT, 13(4), 695-711.
- Towards group transport by swarms of robots. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BIO-INSPIRED COMPUTATION, 1(1-2), 1-13.
- Evolution of solitary and group transport behaviors for autonomous robots capable of self-assembling. ADAPT BEHAV, 16(5), 285-305.
- Self-assembly at the macroscopic scale. P IEEE, 96(9), 1490-1508.
- Simple learning rules to cope with changing environments. J R SOC INTERFACE, 5(27), 1193-1202.
- Moving targets: collective decisions and flexible choices in house-hunting ants.. Swarm Intell., 1, 81-94.
- Autonomous self-assembly in swarm-bots. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS, 22(6), 1115-1130.
- A collective perception model for neighbor selection in groups based on visual attention mechanisms. New Journal of Physics.
Chapters
- Self-Assembly, Encyclopedia of Astrobiology (pp. 2727-2728). Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Self-Assembly, Encyclopedia of Astrobiology (pp. 1-2). Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Correction to: Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems, Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (pp. C1-C1). Springer International Publishing
- Self-assembly In Gargaud M (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Astrobiology (pp. 2239-2240). Springer
- Part f swarm intelligence, Springer Handbook of Computational Intelligence (pp. 1289).
- S, Encyclopedia of Astrobiology (pp. 2227-2227). Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Self-Assembly, Encyclopedia of Astrobiology (pp. 1-2). Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- The Swarm-bot experience: Strength and mobility through physical cooperation In Kernbach S (Ed.), Handbook of Collective Robotics: Fundamentals and Challenges (pp. 49-79). Pan Stanford Publishing
- Self assembly In Gargaud M (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Astrobiology
- S, Encyclopedia of Astrobiology (pp. 1487-1487). Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Conference proceedings papers
- Sharing the control of robot swarms among multiple human operators: a user study. 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Proceedings (pp 8847-8853). Detroit, Michigan, USA, 1 October 2023 - 1 October 2023. View this article in WRRO
- Moving mixtures of active and passive elements with robots that do not compute. Swarm Intelligence: 13th International Conference, ANTS 2022, Málaga, Spain, November 2–4, 2022, Proceedings (pp 183-195). Cham, 2 November 2022 - 4 November 2022.
- Multi-Operator Control of Connectivity-Preserving Robot Swarms Using Supervisory Control Theory. 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 23 May 2022 - 27 May 2022.
- Design of a Switched Control Lyapunov Function for Mobile Robots Aggregation. PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATICS IN CONTROL, AUTOMATION AND ROBOTICS (ICINCO) (pp 492-499)
- Distributed optimisation and deconstruction of bridges by self-assembling robots. Robotics: Science and System XVIII. New York, NY, USA, 27 June 2022 - 27 June 2022.
- A minimalist solution to the multi-robot barrier coverage problem. Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2021, Vol. 13054 (pp 349-353). Lincoln, United Kingdom, 8 September 2021 - 10 September 2021.
- Distributed self-assembly of cantilevers by force-aware robots. Proceedings of 2021 International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems (MRS) (pp 110-118). Cambridge, UK, 4 November 2021 - 4 November 2021.
- Area coverage in two-dimensional grid worlds using computation-free agents. Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, Vol. 13054 (pp 360-364). Lincoln, United Kingdom, 8 September 2021 - 10 September 2021.
- Sampling-based search for a semi-cooperative target. 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (pp 4774-4781). Las Vegas, NV, USA, 25 October 2020 - 25 October 2020.
- Supervisory control of robot swarms using public events. Proceedings of 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (pp 7193-7199). Paris, France, 31 May 2020 - 31 May 2020.
- Turing learning with hybrid discriminators: combining the best of active and passive learning. GECCO 2020: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (pp 121-122). New York, NY, USA, 8 July 2020 - 8 July 2020.
- Self-Reconfiguration in Two-Dimensions via Active Subtraction with Modular Robots. Robotics: Science and Systems
- Decentralized Pose Control of Modular Reconfigurable Robots Operating in Liquid Environments. IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (pp 4855-4861)
- Decentralized Gathering of Stochastic, Oblivious Agents on a Grid: A Case Study with 3D M-Blocks. International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems, MRS 2019 (pp 245-251)
- A soft-bodied modular reconfigurable robotic system composed of interconnected Kilobots. Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems (pp 50-52). New Brunswick, NJ, USA, 22 August 2019 - 23 August 2019.
- Beyond Local Nash Equilibria for Adversarial Networks. Communications in Computer and Information Science, Vol. 1021 (pp 73-89)
- Spatial coverage without computation. 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (pp 9674-9680). Montreal, Canada, 20 May 2019 - 20 May 2019.
- Turn-minimizing multirobot coverage. Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 2019-May (pp 1014-1020)
- Boundary Detection in a Swarm of Kilobots. Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems: 20th Annual Conference, TAROS 2019 (pp 462-466), 3 July 2019 - 5 July 2019.
- Towards a Swarm Robotic System for Autonomous Cereal Harvesting. Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, 20th Annual Conference (pp 458-461), 3 July 2019 - 5 July 2019.
- Balanced task allocation by partitioning the multiple traveling salesperson problem. 2019 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (pp 1479-1487). Montreal, Canada, 13 May 2019 - 13 May 2019.
- HyMod: A 3-DOF hybrid mobile and self-reconfigurable modular robot and its extensions. Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems: 13th International Symposium, Vol. 6 (pp 401-414). London, UK, 7 November 2016 - 7 November 2016.
- Evo-bots: a simple, stochastic approach to self-assembling artificial organisms. Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems: 13th International Symposium, Vol. 6 (pp 373-385). London, UK, 7 November 2016 - 7 November 2016.
- Emergence and inhibition of synchronization in robot swarms. Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems: 13th International Symposium (pp 475-486). London, UK, 7 November 2016 - 7 November 2016.
- Shepherding with robots that do not compute. Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Life ECAL 2017, 4 September 2017 - 8 September 2017.
- OpenSwarm: an event-driven embedded operating system for miniature robots. Proceedings of IROS 2016. Daejeon, Korea, 9 October 2016 - 9 October 2016.
- Human-robot swarm interaction with limited situational awareness. Swarm Intelligence (pp 125-136). Brussels, Belgium, 7 September 2016 - 7 September 2016.
- Using Google Glass in human-robot swarm interaction. Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, Vol. 9716 (pp 196-201). Sheffield, UK
- Human management of a robotic swarm. Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, Vol. 9716 (pp 282-287). Sheffield, UK
- Modular Hydraulic Propulsion: A Robot that Moves by Routing Fluid Through Itself. 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (pp 5189-5196). Stockholm, Sweden, 16 May 2016 - 16 May 2016.
- HiGen: A High-Speed Genderless Mechanical Connection Mechanism, with Single-Sided Disconnect, for Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robots. Proc. of the 2014 IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2014 (pp 3926-3932). Chicago, IL, 14 September 2014 - 18 May 2014.
- Application of Supervisory Control Theory to Swarms of e-puck and Kilobot Robots. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp 62-73). Brussels, Belgium, 10 September 2014 - 12 May 2014.
- Coevolutionary Learning of Swarm Behaviors Without Metrics. Proc. of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (pp 201-208). Vancouver, Canada, 12 July 2014 - 15 July 2014.
- A Strategy for Transporting Tall Objects with a Swarm of Miniature Mobile Robots. 2013 IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2013 (pp 863-869)
- A minimal model of the phase transition into thermoregulatory huddling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 8064 LNAI (pp 381-383)
- A stochastic self-reconfigurable modular robot with mobility control. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 7429 LNAI (pp 416-417)
- Vision-based segregation behaviours in a swarm of autonomous robots. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 6856 LNAI (pp 428-429)
- Cooperative multi-robot box pushing inspired by human behaviour. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 6856 LNAI (pp 380-381)
- Forming nested 3D structures based on the brazil nut effect. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 6856 LNAI (pp 394-395)
- Swarm-bots to the rescue. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 5777 LNAI(PART 1) (pp 165-172)
- Towards an autonomous evolution of non-biological physical organisms. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 5777 LNAI(PART 1) (pp 173-180)
- View this article in WRRO
- Recent Advances in Swarm Robotics. USES Conference Proceedings
Datasets
- Grants
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- Horizon Europe OpenSwarm: Orchestration and Programming ENergy-aware and collaborative Swarms With AI-powered Reliable Methods, £463,699, from 01/01/2023
- EPSRC 'EPSRC Core Capital', £104,196, from 22/01/2020
- DSTL 'DSTL Multi Robot Systems', £98.781, from 30/10/2019
- Industry Research/Consultancy, 'Modular robotics', from 24/03/2017
- EPSRC 'Robotics Capital Equipment' £462,075, 01/10/2016 - 31/03/2017
- EPSRC ‘Human-Machine Cooperation in Robotics and Autonomous Systems’, £330,333.80 (App No.138565) 01/07/2013 – 30/09/2014
- ESPRC ‘Evo-Bots’, £100,905 (App No. 135020) 01/07/2013 – 31/12/2014
- EU FP7 'Evolving Robots', £37,125 (PERG07-GA-2010-267354) 01/09/2010 - 31/08/2013
- Unilever Research ‘Unilever Research Portsunlight’, £62,414 (App No. 132096) 01/11/2011 – 31/07/2012
- Teaching activities
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I currently teach the following modules:
- ACS6501 Foundations of Robotics
- Professional activities and memberships
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- General Chair: DARS 2016 (13th Int Symp on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems)
- Chair, IEEE CIS Task Force on Swarm Intelligence (2016-2017)
- Editor, IROS 2019 - 2015 (IEEE/RSJ Int Conf on Intelligent Robots and Systems)
- Associate Editor: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (from 2015)
- Associate Editor: IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (from 2015)
- Associate Editor: Swarm Intelligence (from 2013)
- Associate Editor: ICRA 2020-2019, 2015 - 2012 (IEEE Int Conf on Robotics and Automation)
- Associate Editor: IROS, 2014 - 2012 (IEEE/RSJ Int Conf on Intelligent Robots and Systems)
- Program Co-Chair: GECCO 2018 (Swarm Intelligence Track)
- Program Co-Chair: AAMAS 2016 (Robotics Track)
- Program Co-Chair: ANTS 2012 (8th Int Conf on Swarm Intelligence)
- Program Co-Chair: TAROS 2011 (12th Conf Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems)
- Publication Chair: ANTS 2010 (7th Int Conf on Swarm Intelligence)
- Best/Outstanding Associate Editors: 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
- Member of the Editorial Board: Frontiers in Robotics & AI
- Part Editor: Springer Handbook of Computational Intelligence
- Guest Editor: Distributed Robotics special issue (Auton Robots, 2018)
- Guest Editor: Swarm Robotics special issue (Neural Comput & Appl, 2010)
- Guest Editor: TAROS 2011 special issue (Robot Auton Syst)
- Guest Editor: ANTS 2010 and ANTS 2012 special issues (Swarm Intell)
- Grant Reviewer for national funding bodies (EU, Canada, UK, Switzerland, Germany, Austria)
- Reviewer (e.g., Royal Soc Interface, IEEE Trans Robot, Int J Robot Res, IEEE Trans Evol Compt, PLoS ONE)
- SPC Member: AAMAS 2018
- PC Member: RSS 2020, NeurIPS 2020, IJCAI 2020, AAMAS 2020, GECCO 2020
Invited talks (selected)
- "Advances in distributed robotics and Turing Learning", SSR, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2018)
- "Robots, swarms and Turing learning", Plenary talk at 27th ERNSI Workshop (European Research Network on System Identification), Cambridge, UK (2018)
- "Robots, swarms and Turing learning", Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Konstanz, Germany (2018)
- "Less is more? Defining your building blocks", Dagstuhl seminar on Algorithmic Foundations of Programmable Matter, Germany (2018)
- "Less is more? Controlling swarms and Turing learning", Biological Distributed Algorithms (BDA) Workshop, UCL, UK (2018)
- "Less is more? Controlling swarms and Turing learning", Conference on Collective Robotics, International Centre for Theoretical Physics/UNESCO, Italy (2018)
- "Less is more? New approaches for swarm control and inference", Janelia Conference on Distributed, Collective Computation in Biological and Artificial Systems, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA (2018)
- "Swarms - design, interaction and learning", University of Southampton, UK (2017)
- "Advances in massively distributed robotics and machine learning", ULB, Brussels, Belgium (2017)
- "Bandits, swarms, and Turing Learning", University of Bristol, UK (2017)
- "Less is more? New approaches for swarm control and inference", 2016 CCS Workshop, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2016)
- "Controlling swarms of robots without computation", JSPS EPSRC UK - Japan Workshop on Soft Robotics, University of Cambridge, UK (2016)
- "Swarm robotics", IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems, NUS, Singapore (2016)
- "Less is more? New approaches for swarm control and inference", University of Liverpool, UK (2016)
- "Less is more? New approaches for swarm control and inference", NIPS 2016 Workshop, Montreal, Canada (2015)
- "Swarm robotics: Minimalism, learning and evolution" - University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2015)
- "Controlling robot swarms - from theory to practice - and evolution beyond control", EPFL, Switzerland (2015)
- "Swarm robotics - the future of healthcare?", RE.WORK Future Tech Summit, London, UK (2015)
- "Swarm robotics: Minimalism, learning and evolution" - ULB, Belgium (2014)
- "Swarm robotics: Minimalism, learning and evolution" - University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA (2014)
- "Is less more? Design principles for massively distributed robotic systems" - The Royal Society UK-Russia Frontiers of Science meeting, Kazan, Russia (2013)
- "Towards distributed autonomous robotic systems," CSAIL, MIT, USA (2012)
- "Towards autonomous robotic systems," Transducers Science and Technology Group, Univ. of Twente, The Netherlands (2011)
- "From natural swarms to swarms of robots," Thrilling Wonder Stories 3, Architectural Association London, UK (2011)
- "Self-assembly at the macroscopic scale," Self-Assembly on all Scales workshop, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany (2011)
- "Autonomous mobile systems inspired by nature," Institute of Computer Science, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany (2009)
- "Autonomous robotic systems inspired by nature," Fakultaet fuer Informatik, Univ. of Karlsruhe, Germany (2009)
- "Physical interactions in multi-robot systems," Faculty of EE & IT, Technical Univ. of Munich, Germany (2009)
- "Self-assembling robots: Physical interactions in collective robotics," IPVS, Univ. of Stuttgart, Germany (2008)
- "What properties are required for individuals that work in groups or teams?," IPAB, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK (2007)
- "Teamwork in colonies of insect-like robots," Bristol Robotics Laboratory, UK (2007)
- "Self-assembly and its use in swarm-bot," Murata Lab, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan (2005)
- "Group transport by a self-assembling robotic system," Kosuge and Wang Lab, Tohoku Univ., Japan (2005)
- "Swarm-bots: A self-assembling robotic system," Fukuda Lab, Nagoya Univ., Japan (2005)