On 16 December 2015, the ASSISIbf LARICS team organized a training at the local Faculty for their master students. The purpose of the training was to present, through selected lectures and a practical session, the overall goals of the ASSISIbf project and the results accomplished in the first half of the project.
Prof. Bogdan gave a talk on the general concepts of the project. The students could find out what the FET programme, FOCAS initiative is, collective adaptive systems there are and the methodology applied within the project is. Dr. Damjan Miklić and Karlo Griparić presented the software and hardware architecture developed for facilitating ethological experiments on honeybees. The emphasis was put on the distributivity and modularity of the system.
In the practical session, the task for the students was to program Combined Actuator Sensor Units (CASUs), which are being developed within the project. The LARICS staff prepared the arena with fully functional four CASUs and each CASU was given to a group of 3 students to program. Bristlebots were used to mimic the motion of bees and the task was to develop a CASU controller which detects the tiny robots and reacts to their presence by changing CASU temperature and color.