Swarm-bots to the Rescue

• Presented at: 10th European Conf. on Artifical Life, ECAL 2009, Budapest, Hungary, Sept.13-16, 2009
• Published in: Proceedings of the 10th European Conf. on Artifical Life, ECAL 2009, p. 165-172
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5777
• Berlin, Germany: Springer Verlag, 2009

We explore the problem of resource allocation in a system made up of autonomous agents that can either carry out tasks individually or, when necessary, cooperate by forming physical connections with each other. We consider a group transport scenario that involves transporting broken robots to a repair zone. Some broken robots can be transported by an individual 'rescue' robot, whereas other broken robots are heavier and therefore require the rescue robots to self-assemble into a larger and stronger composite entity. We present a distributed controller that solves this task while efficiently allocating resources. We conduct a series of real-world experiments to show that our system can i) transport separate broken robots in parallel, ii) trigger self-assembly into composite entities when necessary to overcome the physical limitations of individual agents, iii) efficiently allocate resources and iv) resolve deadlock situations.

Keywords: self-assembly ; task allocation ; swarm intelligence ; search and rescue ; cooperation ; group transport ; autonomous robots ; multi-robot systems ; swarm robotics ; [MOBOTS]

Reference

• LSRO-CONF-2009-018
• doi:10.1007/978-3-642-21283-3_21

Record created on 2009-07-01, modified on 2012-03-20