COSΦ: Artificial pheromone system for robotic swarms research

Abstract

Pheromone-based communication is one of the most effective ways of communication widely observed in nature. It is particularly used by social insects such as bees, ants and termites; both for inter-agent and agentswarm communications. Due to its effectiveness; artificial pheromones have been adopted in multi-robot and swarm robotic systems for more than a decade. Although, pheromonebased communication was implemented by different means like chemical (use of particular chemical compounds) or physical (RFID tags, light, sound) ways, none of them were able to replicate all the aspects of pheromones as seen in nature. In this paper, we propose a novel artificial pheromone system that is reliable, accurate and it uses off-the-shelf components only -LCD screen and low-cost USB camera. The system allows to simulate several pheromones and their interactions and to change parameters of the pheromones (diffusion, evaporation, etc.) on the fly allowing for controllable experiments. We tested the performance of the system using the Colias platform in single-robot and swarm scenarios. To allow the swarm robotics community to use the system for their research, we provide it as a freely available open-source package.

Shaping the collision selectivity in a looming sensitive neuron model with parallel ON and OFF pathways and spike frequency adaptation

“…This is the only applied sensor in this research. It has been developed for biorobotics research, including swarm robotic applications [67,66], as well as neural vision systems research [56,15,21,20,9]. As illustrated in Fig.…”

Scale invariance in natural and artificial collective systems: a review

“…Two final examples of scale-invariant spatial features encountered in nature with direct potential applications are given by the fractal-shaped pheromone trails and by the power-law-distributed random-walk trajectories, both used to enhance exploration and foraging. Although depositing pheromone trails can be challenging for artificial artefacts (despite some attempts that have already been made with robots, see [204,205]), the pheromone concept can be used to build scale-invariant robot chains to facilitate exploration (so far, only non-scale-invariant chains have been considered, see [206]). Additionally, some attempts to implement power-law distributed random walks in robot swarms have already been made.…”

ColCOS Φ: A Multiple Pheromone Communication System for Swarm Robotics and Social Insects Research

“…This system claims to track hundreds of patterns in real-time using a standard PC [28]. In the follow-up research work, Farshad et al [18] redesigned the patterns and upgraded the software so that the localisation system could not only grasp robots' position P i , where i ∈ {1, 2, 3, ..., N } and N is the number of robots to be tracked, but also identify individual robot. The data of robots' position could be regarded as J i,j in (2) or (µ x , µ y ) in (5) to calculate the pheromone field.…”