Scalable Design and Control Methodologies for Self-Assembly at All Scales

Grégory Mermoud, Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Laboratory (DISAL), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne

Abstract: The future of integrated systems lies in their ability to be reactive, adaptive, ubiquitous and reliable. As research advances, it appears more and more clearly that the future integrated systems fulfilling all these requirements will need to be both extremely miniaturized and massively distributed. Indeed, the intrinsic limitations of ultra-small integrated systems in term of sensing, actuation, and control prevent them to carry out a task individually. However, there are at least two main obstacles lying on the route to these compelling devices: (i) our inability to manufacture and package hybrid MEMS devices endowed with the three essential features of a robotic node, i.e. sensing, actuation, and control, and (ii) the lack of suitable control strategies and modeling methodologies for distributed robotic systems at this size range. In this presentation, we present the first bricks of a methodology based on self-assembly for designing, fabricating, and controlling distributed intelligent systems in a scalable fashion.

About the speaker: Grégory Mermoud  graduated in Computer Science from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (I&C-EPFL) in spring 2006. During his master thesis, he investigated agent-based approaches for modeling self-assembling chemical networks under the guidance of Prof. Alcherio Martinoli and Prof. Kay Severin. After graduation, Grégory worked as a research assistant both in the Laboratory of Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms (DISAL-ENAC) and the Laboratory of Microsystems (LMIS1-STI) headed by Prof. Alcherio Martinoli and Prof. Juergen Brugger, respectively. Since September 2007, Grégory is pursuing graduate studies in Computer Science and Microengineering in the Laboratory of Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms and the Laboratory of Microsystems at EPFL.