Department of Computing and Electronic Systems
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park Colchester
CO4 3SQ United Kingdom

Room: 1N1.2.6
Tel. +44 (0)1206 874093
E-Mail: rdenar@essex.ac.uk

Vehicular dynamics, machine learning, evolutionary computation, flocking, swarm intelligence, probabilistic robotics.

PhD topic: Automatic Control of Miniature Vehicles Through Modelling
In this work I am investigating the automatic design of controllers for robots that have non-trivial dynamics, without using any vehicle-specific specific domain knowledge. The only information available for the automatic design process is a sample of data recorded while a pilot was controlling the car, one of the model helicopters, or the aircraft used in this work.
The basis of my technique is the precise automatic modelling of the vehicle under study; given such a model, it is then possible to automatically design a suitable controller.
This research is also part of the Ultraswarm project (formerly Gridswarm).

I am supervised in this research by Prof. Owen Holland

MoD Grand Challenge
I have also worked part-time as a research engineer for Swarm Systems Ltd and with their team I took part in the 2008 MoD Grand Challenge competition. In less than a year we succeeded in designing and building a swarm of autonomous miniature rotorcraft. Together with Richard Newcombe I was in charge of the control, sensor fusion and navigation algorithms.
Technical details can not obviously be disclosed, but here are a video and some pictures taken during the competition.

The Swarm Systems entry was awarded the prize for most innovative idea! Watch video...

Robotic car
In my spare time I am also collaborating with Dr. Simon Lucas , Hugo Gravato Marques and Richard Newcombe on a prototype robotic car. Watch video...

[21 Aug 2008] Swarms of robots join the army, article by David Hambling, The Guardian.

[19 Aug 2008] Military technology: MoD announces winner of robot challenge, article by James Randerson, The Guardian.

[2 May 2008] Mini-helicopters, flying saucers and robot buggies fight it out for war games prize, article by Ian Sample, The Guardian..

[29 Apr 2008] English village to be invaded in spybot competition, article by Ceri Perkins, NewScientist.com.

[9 Jun 2005] Flying Computers Form Swarm Smarts, article by Tracy Staedter, Discovery News.

[9 Jun 2005] Flocks of flying Bluetooth robots may soon take to the skies for a distributed bird's eye view, article by David Pescovitz, Thefeature.com.

[1 Jun 2005] Linux Power Airborne Bots, article by Kevin Poulsen on Wired.com.

[17 May 2005] Unmanned Aircraft Clustered via Bluetooth, thread on Slashdot.org.

[16 May 2005] Flocks of unmanned aircraft form Bluetooth Linux clusters, article on Linuxdevices.com.

CC151 - Introduction to programming - Teaching assistant
Autumn term 2007/2008 (2006/2007) (2005/2006) - Module supervisors: Dr Francisco Sepulveda, Mr. Martin Waite.

CC152 - Programming with Java - Teaching assistant
Spring term 2007/2008 (2006/2007) (2005/2006) - Module supervisors: Dr. Udo Kruschwitz, Mr. Martin Waite.

CC467 - Biologically inspired robotics - Teaching assistant
Spring term 2006/2007 (2005/2006) - Module supervisor: Prof. Owen Holland.

Renzo De Nardi and Owen Holland. Coevolutionary modelling of a miniature rotorcraft. watch Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS10), July 2008. Watch video...

Julian Togelius, Renzo De Nardi and Alberto Moraglio. Geometric PSO + GP = Particle Swarm Programming. Proceedings of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (WCCI08), June 2008.

Julian Togelius, Renzo De Nardi, Hugo Marques, Richard Newcombe, Simon M. Lucas and Owen Holland. Nonlinear Dynamics Modelling for Controller Evolution. Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO07), July 2007. Watch video...

Julian Togelius, Renzo De Nardi and Simon M. Lucas. Towards Automatic Personalised Content Creation for Racing Games. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (IEEE CIG07), April 2007.

Julian Togelius, Simon M. Lucas and Renzo De Nardi. Computational Intelligence in Racing Games. In Norio Baba et al. (eds.) Advanced Intelligent Paradigms in Computer Games, 2007.

Renzo De Nardi and Owen Holland. UltraSwarm: A Further Step Towards a Flock of Miniature Helicopters. Proceedings of the SAB Workshop on Swarm Robotics. September 2006. Watch video...

Julian Togelius, Renzo De Nardi and Simon M. Lucas. Making Racing Fun Through Player Modeling and Track Evolution. Proceedings of the SAB Workshop on Adaptive Approaches to Optimizing Player Satisfaction, September 2006.

Renzo De Nardi, Julian Togelius, Owen E. Holland and Simon M. Lucas. Evolution of Neural Networks for Helicopter Control: Why Modularity Matters. Proceeding of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (WCCI06), July 2006. Watch video...

Renzo De Nardi, Owen Holland, John Woods, and Adrian Clark. SwarMav: A Swarm of Miniature Aerial Vehicles. Proceedings of the 21st Bristol International UAV Systems Conference, April 2006.

Owen Holland, John Woods, Renzo De Nardi, Adrian Clark. Beyond Swarm Intelligence: The Ultraswarm. Proceedings of the IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium (SIS2005), June 2005.

De Nardi Renzo (2004) Flocking of UAVs. Software model and limited vision simulations Tesi di laurea, University of Padua Italy.

Jgpml a Java implementation of Gaussian Process for regression developed in collaboration with Hugo Gravato Marques. download source code...