The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is part of the Department of Information Technology of the University of Zurich. It was founded in 1987 and has been active in biologically motivated computation and robotics for more than a decade. It consists of roughly 25 researchers (postdocs and PhD students) from a diversity of disciplines such as computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, biology (ethology), neurobiology, and physics. Rolf Pfeifer is a physicist, professor of computer science, and the director of the AILab.
Research at the laboratory has a strong biorobotics orientation and can be grouped into four types of projects: navigation, orientation, and locomotion; developmental robotics; evolutionary robotics (including morphogenesis and genetic regulatory networks); and collective intelligence. In all the projects, the goal is to explore the implications of the embodied perspective on intelligence. Although it is the combination of topic areas that makes the laboratory unique, the fields of evolutionary robotics and collective intelligence are most directly relevant to the PACE project.
For a number of years, there has been focus on the co-evolution of morphology and control for the exploration of the concepts of "ecological balance", i.e. the task distribution between morphology, materials, and control. Another central research topic concerns the interdependence between task environment, sensory systems, motor systems, and neural processing. These ideas, combined with a bottom-up view of collective intelligence aiming at "design for emergence", make us confident that the Artificial Intelligence Lab can make unique contributions to PACE.
PACE is a natural continuation of work currently in progress at the Artificial Intelligence Lab: The AILab is one of the pioneering groups in bio-inspired robotics; projects range from robots imitating insect navigation to biologically motivated novel ways for biped locomotion. Recently, in order to tap the important potential of cellular mechanisms, we have been studying artificial systems composed of many macroscopic "cell-like" units in the context of the EU "HYDRA" project. Inspired by developmental biology, the HYDRA project deals with creating a physical model of cellular self-assembling organisms in 3D space, which will co-evolve behaviour, morphology, and perception in response to their environment. However, in order to more closely match the biological paradigm, it would be very desirable to decrease the size of the individual modules. In this respect, we see the PACE project as a direct extension of the HYDRA approach and assume that PACE will profit from the experience gained already in HYDRA.
More details of current research in PACE forthcoming soon.