A Soft-Bodied Modular Reconfigurable Robotic System Composed of Interconnected Kilobots

Pratissoli, Federico; Reina, Andreagiovanni; Lopes, Yuri Kaszubowski; Groβ, Roderich

doi:10.1109/mrs.2019.8901061

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…A picture of a Kilobot with a 3D printed ring [originally designed for the study ofPratissoli et al (2019)] which considerably improves ARK's performance in terms of tracking and LED colour detection. b Kilobots sense via ARK the presence of virtual pheromone in front of themselves at a distance of ∼ 3.5 cm in four 45 • -wide sectors.…”

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confidence: 99%

Sophisticated collective foraging with minimalist agents: a swarm robotics test

et al. 2019

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How groups of cooperative foragers can achieve efficient and robust collective foraging is of interest both to biologists studying social insects and engineers designing swarm robotics systems. Of particular interest are distance-quality trade-offs and swarm-size-dependent foraging strategies. Here, we present a collective foraging system based on virtual pheromones, tested in simulation and in swarms of up to 200 physical robots. Our individual agent controllers are highly simplified, as they are based on binary pheromone sensors. Despite being simple, our individual controllers are able to reproduce classical foraging experiments conducted with more capable real ants that sense pheromone concentration and follow its gradient. One key feature of our controllers is a control parameter which balances the trade-off between distance selectivity and quality selectivity of individual foragers. We construct an optimal foraging theory model that accounts for distance and quality of resources, as well as overcrowding, and predicts a swarm-size-dependent strategy. We test swarms implementing our controllers against our optimality model and find that, for moderate swarm sizes, they can be parameterised to approximate the optimal foraging strategy. This study demonstrates the sufficiency of simple individual agent rules to generate sophisticated collective foraging behaviour.

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confidence: 99%

Sophisticated collective foraging with minimalist agents: a swarm robotics test

et al. 2019

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“…Indeed, robots are normally stored, charged, transported, and deployed in regular formations: squared and rectangular lattices simplify the working logistics and hexagonal lattices maximise the packing density of robots with circular bodies. In addition to simplifying the transport and deployment logistics, having robots in regular formations can be a requirement for the successful execution of the collective task, for instance, the coherent motion of multi-robot aggregates (Pratissoli et al, 2019) and light pattern display (Alhafnawi et al, 2020). In these works, spatiotemporal coordination was achieved by manually providing the robots with information about their relative position within the formation.…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This information can be employed for various subsequent tasks which exploit spatial awareness of the robots (e.g. dynamic role assignment as a function of the robots' position (Pratissoli et al, 2019), or exploit the swarm-level agreement obtained with routine R2 (e.g. use the coordinates to assign globally-unique IDs).…”

Section: Subroutine Sr2c -Coordinates Assignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decentralised construction of a global coordinate system in a large swarm of minimalistic robots

Pluháček¹,

Garnier²,

Reina³

2023

Preprint

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Collective intelligence and autonomy of robot swarms can be improved by enabling the individual robots to become aware they are the constituent units of a larger whole and what is their role. In this study, we present an algorithm to enable positional self-awareness in a swarm of minimalistic error-prone robots which can only locally broadcast messages and estimate the distance from their neighbours. Despite being unable to measure the bearing of incoming messages, the robots running our algorithm can calculate their position within a swarm deployed in a regular formation. We show through experiments with up to 200 Kilobot robots that such positional self-awareness can be employed by the robots to create a shared coordinate system and dynamically self-assign location-dependent tasks. Our solution has fewer requirements than state-of-the-art algorithms and contains collective noise-filtering mechanisms. Therefore, it has an extended range of robotic platforms on which it can run. All robots are interchangeable, run the same code, and do not need any prior knowledge. Through our algorithm, robots reach collective synchronisation, and can autonomously become self-aware of the swarm's spatial configuration and their position within it.

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“…Self-reconfiguration by rearranging connections between modules is the main task of modular robots. This task and others [11,9] rely on message transmission between particles directly connected or connected through other particles. Therefore, it is important to have some kind of identification for each module that remains constant throughout all of the modi-fications the system may go through.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Dynamic ID Assignment Approach for Modular Robots

Assaker

Makhoul²,

Bourgeois³

et al. 2022

Advanced Information Networking and Applications

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In this paper, we present a distributed Id assignment algorithm for modular robots. Our proposed solution supports both the removal and the addition of particles in the system, while maintaining particular characteristics in the logical tree, allowing for fast and efficient inter-module communications. The key goal here is to maintain easily calculated routes between any two particles in the system, with the minimal overhead possible. The idea of "holes" or free IDs is introduced in the system by three main alterations to our previous unique id assignment algorithm [2]. The first being the modification of the unique ID assignment phase. The second being the handling of particles removal from the system. And the third being the handling and initiation of a newly added particle anywhere in the system.

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A Soft-Bodied Modular Reconfigurable Robotic System Composed of Interconnected Kilobots

Abstract: This is a repository copy of A soft-bodied modular reconfigurable robotic system composed of interconnected Kilobots.

Cited by 7 publications

References 15 publications

Sophisticated collective foraging with minimalist agents: a swarm robotics test

Sophisticated collective foraging with minimalist agents: a swarm robotics test

Decentralised construction of a global coordinate system in a large swarm of minimalistic robots

A Dynamic ID Assignment Approach for Modular Robots

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