1. Immunity in self-aware
systems
Professor Jon Timmis
Department of Computer Science
Department of Electronics
York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis
7. An engineering perspective
Building systems that can cooperate to periods of timean individual can
Building systems that operate for long perform tasks without human
intervention is a challenge
not do is also a challenge
A swarm of robots
Big dog
boston dynamics; swarmanoid
9. An immune system for a robot?
Sense and react to events external to the robot
Sense and react to events internal to the robot and
swarm
Sense and react to internal and external events
in an organism
10. An immune system sensing and
reacting to the environment
We live in hazardous environments. T cells are
There are many hazardous environment we
one line of defence.
might like to monitor.
Sniffer dog robot with an immune system for sensing and reaction
13. shaped environment with object placed randomly within the
Simple
tasks
...
arena. Each robot is programmed with behaviour-based sub-
sumption architecture [1]. With this architecture, behaviour
modules for a foraging task include obstacles avoidance
moving to object, grab object, move to base, deposit, scan
arena and random walk. These behaviours can be expressed
with a finite state machine and is given in Fig. 4. A simulation
starts with robots dispatched from the base to explore within
Foraging
the arena to find, collect, and deposit attractors continuously
until end of simulation or until all energy used. Initial energy is
set to 15000 unit and energy consumption for each action per
second is as follow: avoidance 0.9, randomWalk 0.8, moveTo-
• Define behaviour behaviour
Food 0.8, grabObject iagram
for
robot
State
d 1.2, scanArena 0.8, depositObject 1.2
as a FSM
and moveToBase 0.8 unit.
ObjectInGripper
grabObject moveToObject
GrabSuccess
ObjectLost
ObstacleDetected ObstacleDetected
ObjectInSight
Clear Clear
moveToBase avoidance scanArena
Simula;on
of
foraging
ObjectInSight
ObstacleDetected ObstacleDetected
AtBase
ObstacleDetected
Done InArena
depositObject leaveBase randomWalk
13
Fig. 4. Finite state machine for behaviours of a robot in a foraging task.
14. A bit more complicated
Keeping a swarm of robots together
State diagram to control a robot
15. Things can go wrong
Maybe not as robust as we first thought?
16. Collective repair
The immunecan exploit incomputer models of
Which we can developmany responses
Which we system has swarm robots
21. Creating healthy robots and
swarms
Made some initial advances, but we are a long way from really reliable
robots and swarms that can operate autonomously
Make use of insights from immunology to help drive our technology
Can a robot have an immune system?
Yes, but not the same as you and I !!
22. Acknowledgements
• University of York, Royal Society, European Commission,
EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC, Dstl
• Kieran Alden, Paul Andrews, Iain Bate, Lynette Beattie, Mark
Coles, Richard Greaves, James Hilder, Pete Hickey, Rita Ismail,
Paul Kaye, Vipin Kumar, Kelvin Lau, Tiong Lim, Alan Millard,
Lachlan Murray, Daniel Moyo, Mark Neal, Jenny Owen, Nick
Owens, Fiona Polack, Mark Read, Susan Stepney, Andy
Tyrrell, Alan Winfield, Richard Williams, Eva Quarnstrom
