A Distributed Feedback Mechanism to Regulate Wall Construction by a Robotic Swarm

Nest construction is an impressive achievement for social insects. They employ templates (or pat terns) in the environment to guide construction tasks and robot swarms can use similar mechanisms. Early work examined how a spatio-temporal varying template can be utilized by a swarm of minimalist robots to build the framework for a linear wall. From this, it became clear that a method for regulating construction in a variable environment was needed. To this end, a social insect inspired distributed feedback mechanism is proposed and verified. Direct and indirect transfer of information between individuals, through the use of signals and cues, is shown to facilitate closure of a feedback loop allowing the system to operate close to optimally. Perturbation experiments demonstrate the robotic swarm's ability to adapt to environmental changes. The work described in this paper provides the basis for a distributed robotic system capable of constructing any given planar structure—a goal implicit in many of the suggested applications for collective construction.