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AMYBIA
Aggregating MYriads of Biologically-Inspired Agents
AMYBIA screen

This page provides a short presentation of the AMYBIA project. This project was funded by the INRIA ARC 2008 program.

Keywords : complex systems, massively parallel computing schemes, bio-inspired modelling, robustness, decentralised gathering problem

News

N. Vlassopoulos, post-doc researcher, has accomplished a great job: thank you very much !
See the experimental results he has obtained.

Robot simulations

The two-year summary of the project was presented at the ARC meeting which took place in Bordeaux (France) : see the slides of the presentation [pdf, in French].

Experiments were carried out on the MaIA interactive table. To replay the experiments : click here to load the applet.

A first demo showing the robots' aggregation was presented to the attendees of the meeting.

Simulations for Greenberg-Hastings CA

Numerical results of phase-transition localisation with FPGA experiments : click here

Main publications

Objectives

The context of our collaboration is the definition of innovative schemes of decentralised and massively distributed computing. We aim at contributing to this at three levels:
  • At the modelling level, we think that biology provides us with complex and efficient models of such massively distributed behaviours. We start our study by addressing the decentralised gathering problem with the help of an original model of aggregation based on the behaviour of social amoebae. learn more...
  • At the simulation level, our research mainly relies on achieving large scale simulations and on obtaining large statistical samples. Mastering these simulations is a major scientific issue, especially considering the imposed constraints: distributed computations, parsimonious computing time and memory requirements. Furthermore its raises further problems, such as: how to handle asynchronism [Fat04], randomness and statistical analysis? learn more...
  • At the hardware level, the challenge is to constantly confront our models with the actual constraints of a true practise of distributed computing. The main idea is to consider the hardware as a kind of sanity check. Hence, we intend to implement and validate our distributed models on massively parallel computing devices. In return, we expect that the analysis of the scientific issues raised by these implementations will influence the definition of the models themselves. learn more...

Participants & collaborators

Our project involves three main "participants" who form the core of the project, and several "collaborators" with whom we want to work to realise our objectives.

Name Affiliation City Speciality
Nazim Fatès MAIA, INRIA Nancy (Leader) study of the reaction-diffusion scheme
Hugues Berry ALCHEMY, INRIA Orsay biological systems modelling and inspiration for new computing devices
Bernard Girau CORTEX, Nancy U. Nancy embedding simulations on FPGAs
Guy Theraulaz CRCA Toulouse Robotics plateform

This list is by no means closed and should evolve with time : researchers interested in working with us are most welcome !

Motivation of our work

Up to recent years, performance gains in microprocessors have mainly been obtained by a continuous increase of the clock frequency of a single centralised computing processor. Mainly because of power dissipation issues, it is now commonly believed that this recipe will find its limits [Kis02]. One alternative path consists in splitting computations between numerous computation units. For example, recent general purpose computers are already composed of several computing elements (e.g. 8 cores for the new Intel Nehalem microprocessor or 9 cores for the IBM/Sony/Toshiba's Cell microprocessor found in the PS3). Considering plausible future technologies (nanotubes, biological entities, quantum devices), there is a consensus that this trend will continue and that future computing devices may be composed of a large number of computing elements, spread in a more or less disordered way in a two or three dimensional medium [AAC+00] [Deh02] [ITRS] [LW06].

Controlling such massively parallel systems at low costs necessitates the development of new decentralized and locally-expressed algorithms. Furthermore, in such "computing media", communication time increases with the Euclidean distance between the elements. These issues put a strong constraint on locality and represent a great challenge for programming. In particular, a key issue is to identify useful methodologies that will enable us to control the emergent behaviour of a myriad of locally interacting computing elements. To cope with the above considerations, one must consider computing elements that are asynchronous, irregularly located in space, constrained to scarce and local resources and communications, and that may be faulty or noisy.

One long-term objective of our collaboration is to address the following issue:

Given the above enumerated constraints, can we conceive low-cost and purely decentralized control primitives to handle computing elements with defects or faults in their operations or communications?

As the features of decentralisation and robustness are widely found in nature, we propose here to explore the path of bio-inspired computing. More precisely, taking our inspiration from aggregation phenomena observed in microscopic organisms, we aim at using the same principles in order to achieve robust decentralized coordination of virtual entities.

Demos of the prototype model

Click on the images below to display an animation in full screen :
final state of the simulation final state of the simulation
No Noise on the moves of the agents Noise on the moves

The virtual amoebae are in green, obstacles are in blue, excitation fronts are in dark red, refractory cells are in light red, neutral cells are in white. Look how the amoebae manage to gather into compact green groups by avoiding obstacles and taking advantages of narrow spaces. Please note that in order to speed up the simulation, the time scale of the film is not homogeneous : at first images are displayed step by step, then every 10 steps and then every 100 steps.

You can also use the FiatLux CA simulator to test the model directly : Download a pre-configured version.

You need Java to run the program. Double-click to launch or type "java -jar FiatLux27VII07.jar" in a terminal window.



Further reading on this project

see the poster presented in the 2008 ARC meeting.

Last Update : May 2011