The Role of Critical Mass in Multi-Robot Adaptive Task Division

| This work demonstrates the application of the distributed behavior-based approach to generating a multi-robot controller for a group of mobile robots performing a clean-up and collection task. The paper studies a territorial approach to the task in which the robots are assigned individual territories that can be dynamically resized in response to the robots' changing capabilities over the lifetime of the task. The described controller is implemented on a group of four IS Robotics R2e mobile robots. First, we use xed group sizes to evaluate and compare the performance of the two types of adaptive solutions. Second, using a collection of experimental robot data, we empirically derive and demonstrate the critical mass for most eeective foraging in our domain, and show the decline of performance of the space division strategy with increased group size.

[1]  F. Varela,et al.  Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life , 1992 .

[2]  T. Roper.  Ethology: the Mechanisms and Evolution of Behavior, James L. Gould. W. W. Norton, London (1982), 544, +A61. Price £12.25 , 1983 .

[3]  Rodney A. Brooks,et al.  A Robust Layered Control Syste For A Mobile Robot , 2022 .

[4]  D. Comings.  Oxford companion to animal behavior , 1988 .

[5]  Maja J. Matarić,et al.  Designing emergent behaviors: from local interactions to collective intelligence , 1993 .

[6]  Tucker R. Balch,et al.  Communication of behavorial state in multi-agent retrieval tasks , 1993, [1993] Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[7]  Rodney A. Brooks,et al.  The Behavior Language: User''s Guide , 1990 .

[8]  Maja J. Mataric,et al.  Interaction and intelligent behavior , 1994 .

[9]  Lynne E. Parker,et al.  Heterogeneous multi-robot cooperation , 1994 .

[10]  J. Deneubourg,et al.  Self-organization mechanisms in ant societies. II: Learning in foraging and division of labor , 1987 .

[11]  Maja J. Mataric,et al.  Reinforcement Learning in the Multi-Robot Domain , 1997, Auton. Robots.

[12]  Maja J. Matarić,et al.  Behavior-Based Systems: Key Properties and Implications , 1992 .

[13]  J. Deneubourg,et al.  Collective patterns and decision-making , 1989 .

[14]  Piero Mussio,et al.  Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems , 1994 .

[15]  Maja J. Mataric,et al.  Issues and approaches in the design of collective autonomous agents , 1995, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[16]  Guy Theraulaz,et al.  Swarm made architectures , 1992 .

[17]  Maja J. Mataric,et al.  Designing and Understanding Adaptive Group Behavior , 1995, Adapt. Behav..

[18]  Lynne E. Parker,et al.  Adaptive action selection for cooperative agent teams , 1993 .

[19]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Cooperation without communication: Multiagent schema-based robot navigation , 1992, J. Field Robotics.

[20]  Rodney A. Brooks,et al.  Challenges for complete creature architectures , 1991 .