Negotiation of Goal Direction for Cooperative Transport

In this paper, we study the cooperative transport of a heavy object by a group of robots towards a goal. We investigate the case in which robots have partial and noisy knowledge of the goal direction and can not perceive the goal itself. The robots have to coordinate their motion to apply enough force on the object to move it. Furthermore, the robots should share knowledge in order to collectively improve their estimate of the goal direction and transport the object as fast and as accurately as possible towards the goal. We propose a bio-inspired mechanism of negotiation of direction that is fully distributed. Four different strategies are implemented and their performances are compared on a group of four real robots, varying the goal direction and the level of noise. We identify a strategy that enables efficient coordination of motion of the robots. Moreover, this strategy lets the robots improve their knowledge of the goal direction. Despite significant noise in the robots’ communication, we achieve effective cooperative transport towards the goal and observe that the negotiation of direction entails interesting properties of robustness.

[1]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  A Probabilistic Approach to Collaborative Multi-Robot Localization , 2000, Auton. Robots.

[2]  Beat Kleiner,et al.  Graphical Methods for Data Analysis , 1983 .

[3]  Craig W. Reynolds Flocks, herds, and schools: a distributed behavioral model , 1987, SIGGRAPH.

[4]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  Group Transport Along a Robot Chain in a Self-Organised Robot Colony , 2006, IAS.

[5]  I. Couzin,et al.  Collective memory and spatial sorting in animal groups. , 2002, Journal of theoretical biology.

[6]  Claudio Agostinelli,et al.  circular: Circular Statistics, from "Topics in circular Statistics" (2001) S. Rao Jammalamadaka and A. SenGupta, World Scientific. , 2004 .

[7]  John M. Chambers,et al.  Graphical Methods for Data Analysis , 1983 .

[8]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  SWARM-BOT: an experiment in swarm robotics , 2005, SIS.

[9]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  Swarm Robotics: Special Issue Editorial , 2004 .

[10]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  Cooperative hole avoidance in a swarm-bot , 2006, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[11]  S. R. Jammalamadaka,et al.  Topics in Circular Statistics , 2001 .

[12]  I. Aoki A simulation study on the schooling mechanism in fish. , 1982 .

[13]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  Transport of an object by six pre-attached robots interacting via physical links , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[14]  George A. Bekey,et al.  On autonomous robots , 1998, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[15]  Neha Bhooshan,et al.  The Simulation of the Movement of Fish Schools , 2001 .

[16]  Andrew B. Kahng,et al.  Cooperative Mobile Robotics: Antecedents and Directions , 1997, Auton. Robots.

[17]  Luca Maria Gambardella,et al.  The SWARM-BOTS Project , 2004, Künstliche Intell..

[18]  Liqiang Feng,et al.  Measurement and correction of systematic odometry errors in mobile robots , 1996, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..