In the previous post, we looked at a list of top robotics research institutions and labs in Austria. In this post, let’s see the top robotics research institutions and labs in Belgium.
IRIDIA at Université Libre de Bruxelles
IRIDIA is the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, focusing on theoretical and applied research in computational intelligence and swarm intelligence for robotics and optimization.
The research programs in swarm intelligence revolve around the design of algorithms or distributed problem-solving mechanisms, using the social insect colonies as inspiration, for different types of optimization problems and the control of swarms of robots. The main objective is the design and implementation of the self-organizing and self-assembling capabilities, shown by social insects.
You can watch an award-winning short video about Swarmanoid below:
Active Perception Lab at the University of Antwerp
This lab at the University of Antwerp develops biomimetic sensors for environment perception by autonomous systems. The aim is to extract a better understanding of the engineering solutions nature has come up with.
As biological organisms form a tight interaction with their environments where environmental characteristics, sensory morphology, peripheral and central neural processing, and behavioral patterns play a significant role, the lab focuses on three levels simultaneously: the morphology and mechanics, the signal processing, and the behavioral strategies of the model animal systems.
