Efficient Strategy for Collective Navigation Control in Swarm Robotics

In swarm robotics, it is necessary to develop methods and strategies that guide the collective execution of tasks by the robots. The design of such tasks can be done considering it as a collection of simpler behaviors, called subtasks. In this paper, the Wave Swarm is presented as a general strategy to manage the sequence of subtasks that compose the collective navigation, which is an important task in swarm robotics. The proposed strategy is based mainly on the execution of wave algorithms. The swarm is viewed as a distributed system, wherein the communication is achieved by message passing among robot's neighborhood. Message propagation delimits the start and end of each subtask. Simulations are performed to demonstrate that controlled navigation of robot swarms/clusters is achieved with three subtasks, which are recruitment, alignment and movement.

[1]  Radhika Nagpal,et al.  Kilobot: A low cost robot with scalable operations designed for collective behaviors , 2014, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[2]  Alex Fukunaga,et al.  Cooperative mobile robotics: antecedents and directions , 1995 .

[3]  Eric Bonabeau,et al.  Cooperative transport by ants and robots , 2000, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[4]  Michael R. M. Jenkin,et al.  A taxonomy for swarm robots , 1993, Proceedings of 1993 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '93).

[5]  Eliseo Ferrante,et al.  Swarm robotics: a review from the swarm engineering perspective , 2013, Swarm Intelligence.

[6]  Surya P. N. Singh,et al.  V-REP: A versatile and scalable robot simulation framework , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  Craig W. Reynolds.  Flocks, herds, and schools: a distributed behavioral model , 1998 .

[8]  Adrian Segall,et al.  Distributed network protocols , 1983, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[9]  Mauro Birattari,et al.  The TAM: abstracting complex tasks in swarm robotics research , 2015, Swarm Intelligence.

[10]  Seif Haridi,et al.  Distributed Algorithms , 1992, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[11]  Nadia Nedjah,et al.  Distributed strategy for robots recruitment in swarm-based systems , 2016, Int. J. Bio Inspired Comput..

[12]  Guy Theraulaz,et al.  Self-Organization in Biological Systems , 2001, Princeton studies in complexity.

[13]  S Erol.  Swarm Robotics: From Sources of Inspiration to Domains of Application , 2005 .

[14]  Valmir Carneiro Barbosa,et al.  An introduction to distributed algorithms , 1996 .

[15]  Nadia Nedjah,et al.  Wave Algorithm for Recruitment in Swarm Robotics , 2015, ICCSA.

[16]  Levent Bayındır,et al.  A review of swarm robotics tasks , 2016, Neurocomputing.

[17]  Daniele Nardi,et al.  Reactivity and Deliberation: A Survey on Multi-Robot Systems , 2000, Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems.

[18]  Fernando Matía,et al.  An Introduction to Swarm Robotics , 2013 .