A bio-inspired technique for servicing networked robots

Bio-inspirations have paved a way for finding new and novel ways of optimisation in several application scenarios. Virtual pheromones have been used widely for routing in mobile ad-hoc networks and wireless sensor networks as also for communication among robots. In this paper, we describe a multi-robot system wherein mobile agents act as code carriers and in turn facilitate execution of tasks by the robots. Networked robots that need a code to execute an allotted task diffuse, onto their neighbours, pheromones that specifically attract those mobile agents that carry the required code as their payload. The agents move around the network in a conscientious manner but on sensing a pheromone, home onto the concerned robot and provide the code. We compare this pheromone-conscientious method with other mobile agent-based patrolling and resource discovery strategies and portray the relevant results and conclude that the pheromone-conscientious strategy is more conservative in terms of both time and energy consumed.

[1]  W. Wilfred Godfrey,et al.  A Pheromone Based Mobile Agent Migration Strategy for Servicing Networked Robots , 2010, BIONETICS.

[2]  Hoang-Nam Chu,et al.  Swarm Approaches for the Patrolling Problem, Information Propagation vs. Pheromone Evaporation , 2007 .

[3]  Koji Fukuda,et al.  Development of a desktop swarm robot system based on pheromone communication , 2009, Artificial Life and Robotics.

[4]  Imed Bouazizi,et al.  ARA-the ant-colony based routing algorithm for MANETs , 2002, Proceedings. International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshop.

[5]  W. Wilfred Godfrey,et al.  An Immune System Based Multi-robot Mobile Agent Network , 2008, ICARIS.

[6]  Lynne E. Parker,et al.  On the design of behavior-based multi-robot teams , 1995, Adv. Robotics.

[7]  Stephen B. Wicker,et al.  Asymptotic Pheromone Behavior in Swarm Intelligent Manets , 2004, MWCN.

[8]  Yasuhiro Tsujimura,et al.  Design of a Multi-Robot System Using Mobile Agents with Ant Colony Clustering , 2009 .

[9]  Huosheng Hu,et al.  Mobile agent approach to networked robots , 2006 .

[10]  Huosheng Hu,et al.  Application of mobile agents to robust teleoperation of internet robots in nuclear decommissioning , 2003, IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology, 2003.

[11]  Adrian Filipescu,et al.  Virtual pheromones to control mobile robots. A neural network approach , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Automation and Logistics.

[12]  Giovanni Vigna.  Mobile agents: ten reasons for failure , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management, 2004. Proceedings. 2004.

[13]  W. Wilfred Godfrey,et al.  Mobile Agent Cloning for Servicing Networked Robots , 2010, PRIMA.

[14]  Gilbert L. Peterson,et al.  HAMR: A Hybrid Multi-Robot Control Architecture , 2009, FLAIRS Conference.

[15]  Otto Spaniol,et al.  Ant-Routing-Algorithm for Mobile Multi-Hop Ad-Hoc Networks , 2003, Net-Con.

[16]  H. Van Dyke Parunak,et al.  Digital Pheromones for Coordination of Unmanned Vehicles , 2004, E4MAS.