Luis Alonso Pastor

Naroa Coretti Sánchez, Juan Múgica González, Luis Alonso Pastor et al.

The fast urbanization and climate change challenges require solutions that enable the efficient movement of people and goods in cities. We envision future cities to be composed of high-performing walkable districts where transportation needs could be served by fleets of ultra-lightweight shared and autonomous vehicles. A future in which most vehicles would be autonomous creates a new paradigm for the possible interactions between vehicles. Natural swarms are a great example of how rich interactions can be; they can divide tasks, cluster, build together, or transport cooperatively. The field of swarm robotics has translated some of the behaviors from natural swarms to artificial systems, proving to make systems more flexible, scalable, and robust. Inspired by nature and supported by swarm robotics, this paper proposes a future mobility in which shared, electric, and autonomous vehicles would be multi-functional and behave as a collaborative system. In this future, fleets of multi-functional vehicles would complete different tasks collaboratively, giving a response to the different urban mobility needs. This paper contributes with the proposal of a framework for future urban mobility that integrates current research and mobility trends in a novel and unique way.

Antonio Luca Alfeo, Eduardo Castelló Ferrer, Yago Lizarribar Carrillo et al.

Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm robotics systems have been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past years and they are expected to become one of the main driving factors for innovation in the field of robotics. The research presented in this paper explores the feasibility of a swarm robotics system in an urban environment. By using bio-inspired foraging methods such as multi-place foraging and stigmergy-based navigation, a swarm of robots is able to improve the efficiency and autonomy of the urban waste management system in a realistic scenario. To achieve this, a diverse set of simulation experiments was conducted using real-world GIS data and implementing different garbage collection scenarios driven by robot swarms. Results presented in this research show that the proposed system outperforms current approaches. Moreover, results not only show the efficiency of our solution, but also give insights about how to design and customize these systems.