Cooperative Transport of Objects of Different Shapes and Sizes

Groß, Roderich; Dorigo, Marco

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-28646-2_10

Cited by 33 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…For example, in this paper, we reported on a trial where a group of 16 robots self-organised into a cyclic structure, which entirely surrounded the object (without being physically connected to it). This structure was functional -it pulled the object like an artificial rope [for a collection of video recordings, see Groß and Dorigo (2008b)]. The drawback of this strategy is that the solution search space is relatively complex and large.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards group transport by swarms of robots

Groß¹,

Dorigo²

2009

IJBIC

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122

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Abstract:We examine the ability of a swarm robotic system to transport cooperatively objects of different shapes and sizes. We simulate a group of autonomous mobile robots that can physically connect to each other and to the transported object. Controllers -artificial neural networks -are synthesised by an evolutionary algorithm. They are trained to let the robots self-assemble, that is, organise into collective physical structures and transport the object towards a target location. We quantify the performance and the behaviour of the group. We show that the group can cope fairly well with objects of different geometries as well as with sudden changes in the target location. Moreover, we show that larger groups, which are made of up to 16 robots, make possible the transport of heavier objects. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the system in terms of task complexity, scalability and fault tolerance and point out potential directions for future research.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards group transport by swarms of robots

Groß¹,

Dorigo²

2009

IJBIC

Self Cite

122

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Although robot teams working toward a common goal has been studied intensively, focus has been on enabling the robots to collect global information by exploring their environment [13,26] or collectively manipulating an object that could not be manipulated by a single robot [19,17]. This work points to a new way in which robots can help one another: they can share their experiences by sharing self-models.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploiting multiple robots to accelerate self-modeling

Bongard

2007

Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation

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In previous work [8] a computational framework was demonstrated that allows a mobile robot to autonomously evolve models its own body for the purposes of adaptive behavior generation or recovery from damage. Conceivably, robots working in tandem could share their experiences such that one robot, when faced with a situation already encountered by another robot, could draw on that experience and adapt more rapidly. A first demonstration of this is given here: multiple robots with the same or similar body plan, but acting independently, combine self-models such that they accelerate modeling. Two approaches are investigated: the robots feed their experiences back into a common modeling engine, or they maintain their own modeling engine but share their best self-models with each other. It was found that the latter approach achieves a significant improvement in modeling compared to a single robot and compared to the former approach. This finding has implications for how to design autonomous robots acting in concert to achieve large-scale tasks.

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“…The best of the evolved controllers efficiently transported the object as required. Furthermore, these controllers proved robust with respect to variations in the size and shape of the object they had to transport [8].…”

Section: Cooperative Transportmentioning

confidence: 99%

SWARM-BOT: an experiment in swarm robotics

Dorigo

2005

Proceedings 2005 IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium, 2005. SIS 2005.

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This paper provides an overview of the SWARM-BOTS project, a robotics project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Commission (IST-2000-31010). We describe the s-bot, a small autonomous robot with self-assembling capabilities that we designed and built within the project. Then we illustrate the cooperative object transport scenario that we chose to use as a test-bed for our robots. Last, we report on results of experiments in which a group of s-bots perform a variety of tasks within the scenario which may require selfassembling, physical cooperation and coordination.

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Cooperative Transport of Objects of Different Shapes and Sizes

Cited by 33 publications

References 10 publications

Towards group transport by swarms of robots

Towards group transport by swarms of robots

Exploiting multiple robots to accelerate self-modeling

SWARM-BOT: an experiment in swarm robotics

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