David Garzón Ramos

Introducing myself,

I am Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow at the UCD School of Mechanical & Materials Engineering, University College Dublin, Ireland.

I conduct my research in the UCD Laboratory for Advanced Manufacturing Simulation and Robotics (LAMS), with a focus on advancing collective robotics, swarm intelligence, and machine learning to support of sustainable industrial automation and economic growth.

I received an Electronics Engineering degree and a MEng on Industrial Automation from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia. I also received a MSc on Automation and Robotics from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. From 2017 to 2024, I conducted a PhD on swarm robotics at IRIDIA, the Artificial Intelligence research laboratory of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Before starting my position at UCD, I was a Senior Research Associate for swarm robotics at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of Bristol, United Kingdom.

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

I love producing robot videos!!!

EIC EMERGE: emergent awareness from minimal collectives

I was a postdoctoral researcher in the EMERGE project, funded by the European Innovation Council and UK Research and Innovation.

We built 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 involved 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 DEMIURGE project, funded by the European Research Council.

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.