A Study of Bio-inspired Communication Scheme in Swarm Robotics

Stamatis, P. N.; Zaharakis, Ioannis D.; Kameas, Achilles

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-00487-2_41

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Simple means of communication, such as sound and color, on the other hand, are relatively straightforward to implement in real hardware (Floreano et al, 2007), but they are also limited in terms of the amount of information they allow robots to exchange. Examples of bio-inspired ap-proaches such as quorum sensing in bacteria (Bassler, 1999), trophallaxis (Schmickl and Crailsheim, 2008), and hormone-based communication (Stamatis et al, 2009) have been shown to be simple, yet effective strategies to achieve coordination through communication in multirobot systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Onboard Sensors in Robotic Swarms - Local Collective Sensing through Situated Communication

Rodrigues

Duarte

Oliveira

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence

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The constituent robots in swarm robotics systems are typically equipped with relatively simple, onboard sensors of limited quality and range. When robots have the capacity to communicate with one another, communication has so far been exclusively used for coordination. In this paper, we present a novel approach in which local, situated communication is leveraged to overcome the sensory limitations of the individual robots. In our approach, robots share sensory inputs with neighboring robots, thereby effectively extending each other's sensory capabilities. We evaluate our approach in a series of experiments in which we evolve controllers for robots to capture mobile preys. We compare the performance of (i) swarms that use our approach, (ii) swarms in which robots use only their limited onboard sensors, and (iii) swarms in which robots are equipped with ideal sensors that provide extended sensory capabilities without the need for communication. Our results show that swarms in which local communication is used to extend the sensory capabilities of the individual robots outperform swarms in which only onboard sensors are used. Our results also show that in certain experimental configurations, the performance of swarms using our approach is close to the performance of swarms with ideal sensors.

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