David Garzón Ramos

Introducing myself,

I am a Research Associate of the School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology at University of Bristol. I conduct my research in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), funded through the EIC EMERGE project.

I received an Electronics Engineer degree and a master's degree on Engineering and Industrial Automation from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. I also received a master’s degree on Automation and Robotics from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. From 2017 to 2024, I conducted a PhD on swarm robotics at IRIDIA, the Artificial Intelligence research laboratory of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In 2024, I joined the team of Dr. Sabine Hauert at University of Bristol to investigate mechanisms for emergent awareness in robot swarms.

My research interests are swarm robotics, optimization-based design, collective intelligence, and the Robot Operating System (ROS).

I love producing robot videos!!! Specially when there are many of them :) .

EIC EMERGE: emergent awareness from minimal collectives

I currently participate in the realization of the EIC EMERGE project.

Our goal is to build a philosophical, mathematical, and technological framework to demonstrate how collaborative awareness—a representation of shared existence, environment and goals—can arise from the interactions of minimal artificial entities.

My contribution to this project involves exploring how to use automatic design methods to select, combine, and fine-tune the building units that give rise to emergent collective awareness; supported by demonstrations performed with robot collectives.

ERC DEMIURGE: automatic design of robot swarms

I conducted my PhD within the framework of the ERC DEMIURGE project.

We advanced the state of the art in swarm robotics by thoroughly exploring various aspects of the realization of robot swarms in an integrated and automatic way.

My contributions focused on investigating how automatic design methods can leverage environmental and inter-robot signaling to address problems where a swarm must communicate, react to events, and perform tasks sequentially.