Construction Task Allocation through the Collective Perception of a Dynamic Environment

Building structures is a remarkable collective process but its automation remains an open challenge. To address this challenge, robot swarms provide a promising solution. However, collective construction involves a number of difficulties regarding efficient robot allocation to the different activities, particularly if the goal is to reach an optimal construction rate. In this paper, we study an abstract construction scenario, where a swarm of robots is engaged in a collective perception process to estimate the building block density around a construction site. The goal of this perception process is to maintain a minimum density of blocks available to the robots for construction. To maintain this density, the allocation of robots to the foraging task needs to be adjusted such that enough blocks are retrieved. Our results show a robust collective perception process that enables the swarm to maintain a minimum block density under different rates of construction and foraging. Furthermore, our approach allows the system to stabilize around a state in which the robot allocation allows the swarm to maintain a tile density that is close to or above the target minimum.