Research Programme

Recent advances in manufacturing processes, sensors, communication, and embedded processing units allowed systems to autonomously act in and interact with the world and with each other. This newly reached autonomy consequently accelerated the interest in networked systems, swarm robotics, and wireless sensor networks for a large variety of applications. The advances on single systems to augment their individual autonomy and capability to interact with the world enabled recent investigations on networked and at the same time autonomous systems where performance measures involve the entire team or swarm with redundancies rather than focusing on developing a single, entirely fail-safe system. This networked behavior is particularly relevant in tasks with high complexity and that dynamically scale both in size and difficulty.

We find examples of such systems in our everyday lives in transportation of goods, traffic coordination strategies, distributed assembly, and infrastructure inspection. Although worldwide research and development efforts focused on the topic of advancing networked autonomous systems and improving their capabilities, many research questions remain open. In particular, the advancement of miniaturization and embedded solutions only enabled recently to tackle research questions related to issues when using mobile networked systems in higher dimensional spaces and generally networked systems of larger sizes acting in the 3D space of the real world with very limited computation power. These questions are strongly interdisciplinary, involving competencies from several research fields, such as signal processing and control, sensors and physical interfaces, navigation, communications and networking, and system self-organization.

The Karl Popper Doktorats- und Wissenschaftskolleg (KPK) at AAU is devoted to tackle questions in this theme where the findings, through the proximity to practical applications, will be of high interest both for the academic and industrial communities. At AAU, we have a strong constellation of an internationally well-connected and interdisciplinary team of faculty members to ensure high-quality research output and education of young researchers.