00:00This is the thing that works.
00:02Ah, yeah.
00:04That's the thing.
00:05That's the one that works.
00:07Oh, that's the other one.
00:08No, not this one.
00:25Yeah, I know.
00:26Very strange things are coming up.
00:28Maybe we should go to the train station.
00:56We do research on swarming.
00:58We do this in the context of various applications.
01:01For example, how can a swarm of small drones find a gas leak?
01:05Or how can drones collaborate to find a missing person in a search and rescue scenario?
01:12And then we look at how they can coordinate in the best way with their limited resources to achieve these tasks.
01:22At this point, the demos we give still use external infrastructure,
01:27which looks at the drones from the outside and helps the drones to know, for example, where the other drones are.
01:34But in this process, towards the real world, they have to become fully autonomous.
01:39And this means that these swarms of robots will be able to also operate in an environment that's unprepared.
01:47And so if we have a building that's partially collapsed and we want to know are there people inside,
01:53obviously there's no cameras installed on the inside to help the drones.
01:57And so they have to do everything by themselves.
02:00And this means that they have to carry all their sensors, all their processing.
02:04And this is exactly, of course, what you find in nature.
02:06Like honeybees also don't need GPS to navigate.
02:10And that's exactly the kind of capabilities we want to learn from and also give to our robots.
02:17We look very much at the principle that swarms of animals and the animals in the swarm,
02:23they actually follow very simple behaviors like birds.
02:27They look at their closest neighbors in the flock and they do things like,
02:31oh, I don't want to be too close because they don't want to collide.
02:34But I also don't want to be the only one to be away from the flock, right?
02:38So they want to get closer. They align with each other.
02:41And by following such simple rules, you get these beautiful patterns that are very useful for the birds, also against predators.
02:48So at that level, we draw inspiration and we try to make such simple rules also for our robots,
02:54but then for the applications we want to tackle.
02:57And it would be really great if we get a bit closer to actually the astonishing intelligence of tiny creatures like honeybees.
03:08Thank you.
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