ACSOS 2026
Mon 7 - Fri 11 September 2026 Cesena, Italy
ACSOS 2026 (series) /

Keynotes

We are proud to include the following high-profile keynotes into our program this year:




Marco Dorigo (Université Libre de Bruxelles): Bridging Centralized and Decentralized Control in Robot Swarms through Self-Organizing Hierarchies


Abstract: Robot swarms promise scalable and resilient solutions for applications such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and logistics, yet their adoption remains limited by poor controllability. Fully self-organizing swarms achieve robustness and scalability through decentralized coordination and simple local interactions, but this comes at the cost of limited observability and difficulty in shaping global behavior. Conversely, centralized approaches offer ease of control but suffer from scalability issues and single points of failure.

In this talk, I present the Self-Organizing Nervous System for Robot Swarms (SoNS), a middleware framework that enables robots to dynamically form adaptive hierarchical structures. SoNS bridges centralized and decentralized paradigms by supporting functionally centralized coordination of sensing, actuation, and decision-making, while preserving the scalability, flexibility, and fault tolerance of self-organizing systems.

Marco Dorigo
Biosketch: Marco Dorigo received the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering in 1992 from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. From 1992 to 1993, he was a Research Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA. In 1993, he was a NATO-CNR Fellow, and from 1994 to 1996, a Marie Curie Fellow. Since 1996, he has been a tenured Researcher of the FNRS, the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research, and co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the ULB. His current research interests include swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, and metaheuristics for discrete optimization. He is the Founding Editor of Swarm Intelligence, and an Associate Editor or member of the Editorial Boards of many journals on computational intelligence and adaptive systems. Dr. Dorigo is a Fellow of the AAAI, ACM, EurAI, and IEEE. He was awarded numerous international prizes among which the Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2003, delivered by Philippe Busquin, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation; the five-year scientific prize du F.R.S.-FNRS in 2005, delivered by Albert II, King of Belgium; the Cajastur International Prize for Soft Computing “Mamdani Prize” in 2007, delivered by Prof. Lofti Zadeh; the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award in 2015, and the IEEE Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2016. He is also the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant awarded by the European Research Council.