Best paper award for work on swarmalator systems

Working together in the FWF project “Self-organizing synchronization with stochastic coupling”, Udo Schilcher, Jorge Schmidt, Arke Vogell and Christian Bettstetter co-authored the publication “Swarmalators with stochastic coupling and memory”. This paper won the Karsten Schwan Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organising Systems (ACSOS) on 30 September 2021, a prize that recognises the best paper presented at the conference.

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Swarms take over production

Scientists working on the research project SWILT are developing Industry 4.0 algorithms inspired by nature.

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Packages delivered by air: Drones as delivery service

What has travelled by road to reach us until now could be delivered by drones in the future. This has many advantages: Poor rural transport infrastructure or persistent congestion in large cities can be bypassed. In 2013, Amazon was among the first to announce the intention to deliver goods using small autonomous drones. But when might this technology truly become part of our daily lives? Drone researcher Pasquale Grippa provides some answers.

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Efficient and intelligent: Drones get to grips with planning the delivery of goods


When goods are needed urgently, for instance, in rural areas poorly served by transport infrastructure, or in large, heavily congested cities, they could be delivered by drones. In 2013, Amazon was one of the first to declare the intention to work towards the automated delivery of goods by small autonomous helicopters. A multi-disciplinary research team at the Alpen-Adria-Universität assembled by Christian Bettstetter and Friederike Wall is due to deliver initial insights on the efficient operation of (self-organised) delivery of goods. Doctoral student Pasquale Grippa will present the results at the conference “Robotics: Science and Systems”, which is scheduled to take place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from July 12th.

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