Application of Supervisory Control Theory to Swarms of e-puck and Kilobot Robots

Lopes, Yuri Kaszubowski; Leal, André B.; Dodd, Tony J.; Groß, Roderich

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-09952-1_6

Cited by 18 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…None of the two approaches has been assessed in robot experiments yet. Lopes et al (2014) introduced an approach based on supervisory control theory. The approach has been demonstrated by designing a segregation behavior.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

AutoMoDe-Chocolate: automatic design of control software for robot swarms

et al. 2015

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We present two empirical studies on the design of control software for robot swarms. In Study A, Vanilla and EvoStick, two previously published automatic design methods, are compared with human designers. The comparison is performed on five swarm robotics tasks that are different from those on which Vanilla and EvoStick have been previously tested. The results show that, under the experimental conditions considered, Vanilla performs better than EvoStick, but it is not able to outperform human designers. The results indicate that Vanilla's weak element is the optimization algorithm employed The main contributors to this research are G. Francesca and M. Birattari. AutoMoDe and Vanilla were conceived and developed by G. Francesca, M. Brambilla, A. Brutschy, V. Trianni, and M. Birattari.123 Swarm Intell to search the space of candidate designs. To improve over Vanilla and with the final goal of obtaining an automatic design method that performs better than human designers, we introduce Chocolate, which differs from Vanilla only in the fact that it adopts a more powerful optimization algorithm. In Study B, we perform an assessment of Chocolate. The results show that, under the experimental conditions considered, Chocolate outperforms both Vanilla and the human designers. Chocolate is the first automatic design method for robot swarms that, at least under specific experimental conditions, is shown to outperform a human designer.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

AutoMoDe-Chocolate: automatic design of control software for robot swarms

et al. 2015

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“…The generator player is shown in Algorithm 1. It is a modified version from the literature [20], [8]. It evolves the states of all generators of its robot.…”

Section: A Generator Playermentioning

confidence: 99%

Supervisory Control of Robot Swarms Using Public Events

Lopes

Trenkwalder

Leal

et al. 2020

2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

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“…Here, colours red, green, and blue are assigned at the beginning of the experiment. The segregation strategy separates follower robots into distinct groups, whereby each follower robot belongs to at most one leader (Lopes et al 2014). Each leader broadcasts a signal containing its colour within a limited range.…”

Section: Segregation Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Supervisory control theory applied to swarm robotics

et al. 2016

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Currently, the control software of swarm robotics systems is created by ad hoc development. This makes it hard to deploy these systems in real-world scenarios. In particular, it is difficult to maintain, analyse, or verify the systems. Formal methods can contribute to overcome these problems. However, they usually do not guarantee that the implementation matches the specification, because the system's control code is typically generated manually. Also, there is cultural resistance to apply formal methods; they may be perceived as an additional step that does not add value to the final product. To address these problems, we propose supervisory control theory for the domain of swarm robotics. The advantages of supervisory control theory, and its associated tools, are a reduction in the amount of ad hoc development, the automatic generation of control code from modelled specifications, proofs of properties over generated control code, and the reusability of formally designed controllers between different robotic platforms. These advantages are demonstrated in four case studies using the e-puck and Kilobot robot platforms. Experiments with up to 600 physical robots Intell (2016) 10:65-97 are reported, which show that supervisory control theory can be used to formally develop state-of-the-art solutions to a range of problems in swarm robotics.

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Application of Supervisory Control Theory to Swarms of e-puck and Kilobot Robots

Cited by 18 publications

References 10 publications

AutoMoDe-Chocolate: automatic design of control software for robot swarms

AutoMoDe-Chocolate: automatic design of control software for robot swarms

Supervisory Control of Robot Swarms Using Public Events

Supervisory control theory applied to swarm robotics

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