My Ph.D. thesis was about intelligence, robotics and collective behaviour. My contribution to the field of robotics is a new reactive control architecture (action fusion), which is a generalisation of Brook's subsumption, Maes' action selection and Arkin's schema theory. Action fusion provides a simple yet powerful coordination mechanism, which combines the output of several possibly competing basic behaviours into a (hopefully) meaningful action. Action fusion has been implemented on a group of Khepera robots, which used auditive communication to locate and follow a leader. |
My Ph.D. dissertation got the 1999 GFU/SUR award for its redactional quality and the clarity of expression.
You can no longer download my Ph.D. dissertation, but it is now commercially available (edited by the Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes) under the title Des moutons et des robots ().
You can order it online at the editor's or at Amazon France.