FNRS 2024 calls: Focus on the naXys Institute

Elio Tuci is a professor at the Faculty of Computer Science and a member of UNamur's Institut naXys (axe Robotics). He has just been awarded Crédit de Recherche (CDR) du F.R.S - FNRS funding following calls whose results were published in December 2024.

His research falls within the interdisciplinary field of bio-inspired robotics and computational intelligence. In his research activity, he draws inspiration from nature to design control mechanisms enabling artificial agents to operate in a complex environment and learn autonomously from their experience.

The aim of his work is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to design autonomous adaptive systems by developing control mechanisms that underpin complex behavioral, social, cognitive and communication capabilities. On the other, he designs computational and robotic models to generate new and alternative hypotheses concerning the operational principles of cognition and learning in natural organisms: macroscopic (i.e. mathematical) and microscopic (i.e. computational based on computer-simulated agents) models.

The FNRS funding will be used to extend the computing resources available to our team already working on the BABots collaborative project, with a powerful server unit that will enable us to exploit the advantages of parallel computing to carry out advanced research and analysis.

Researchers are implementing the first BABot system in C. elegans. The worm's BABots will be programmed to act as a collective to detect, localize and attack invasive pathogens in a confined agricultural environment.

The BABots project has received funding from the European Innovation Council's Horizon Europe - EIC PathFinder work program under the Project 101098722 agreement.

The Action de Recherche Concertée (ARC) AUTOMATic project

This project aims to develop and test, in a simulation environment, a content-aware urban traffic management system based on a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

More info on the ARC projects website.

The EU-C2W Fellowship - On the study of firefly synchronisation using robots

"Connect with Wallonia - Come 2 Wallonia" (C2W) is a European postdoctoral program (Marie Skłodowska Curie COFUND action) open to postdoctoral researchers in all fields of research. The project, led by Dr Marcelo Avida and Cinzia Tomaselli, involves implementing what is known as synchronization response in a population of e-puck robots. It is inspired by behavior observed in certain species of fireflies as part of courtship.

More info on the C2W website.

The SPW's Win4Doc project is researching Monaster - Failure monitoring system with a preventive and autonomous maintenance strategy based on robotics and artificial intelligence for space applications.

This project led by Antoine Hubermont aims to create a platform for visualizing and predicting information about the condition of terrestrial assets, assessing the risk level of their failure, identifying anomalies and initiating a process to restore their functions. The platform integrates and combines the detection and prediction capabilities of artificial intelligence-based solutions with the technical capabilities of robotic solutions. The project is being carried out in collaboration with Telespazio Belgium.

The SPW BEWARE fellowship is researching ILabBot - Intelligent Laboratory Autonomous Mobile Robot for Pharmaceutical Industry

The aim of this project led by Dr. Muhanad Alkilabi is to equip the HelMO mobile robot with all the necessary control mechanisms and possibly additional sensors to enable the robot to operate autonomously in a pharmaceutical laboratory environment in order to automate production processes currently carried out by human operators. This project is being carried out in collaboration with CISEO.

• BABots | A European biorobotics project
• Synthetic choirs| A choir of robots created at UNamur