New CASCB group leader Andreagiovanni Reina
Andreagiovanni Reina, who is an expert on swarm robotics and collective decision-making, joined the Cluster of Excellence Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour in December 2023 as junior group leader.
Why did you decide to take up the position of Junior Group Leader at the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour?
My research is highly interdisciplinary, and Konstanz’s cluster is a fantastic place to be for this. The centre aggregates a young and vibrant group of world-class researchers who combine techniques and methodologies from a variety of disciplines with the goal of understanding and controlling collective behaviour. Having different points of view on similar processes is what will help us to make progress in this field. I am here for interdisciplinary research!
What exactly do you plan to do with your working group?
I am interested in building mathematical and computational models to understand and analyze collective behaviour. Building on these models, we aim to employ our understanding to design the algorithms for groups of simple robots which leverage self-organization to perform tasks as a team that are more advanced than any single robot could perform alone. My group aims to find efficient, cost-effective, adaptive, and scalable solutions for controlling the collective behaviour of large-scale robotics systems. This requires working together with biologists, neuroscientists, physicists, and computer scientists to take inspiration from the marvellous solutions that have evolved in group-living organisms and adapt these solutions to build the robots of our future.