From Fireflies to Fault-Tolerant Swarms of Robots

Abstract

Abstract. One of the essential benefits of multi-robot systems is redundancy. In case one robot breaks down, another robot can take steps to repair the failed robot or take over the failed robot's task. Although fault tolerance and robustness to individual failures have often been central arguments in favor of multi-robot systems, few studies have been dedicated to the subject. In this study, we take inspiration from the synchronized flashing behavior observed in some species of fireflies. We derive a completely distributed algorithm to detect non-operational individuals in a multi-robot system. Each robot flashes by lighting up its onboard LEDs and neighboring robots are driven to flash in synchrony. Since robots that are suffering catastrophic failures do not flash periodically, they can be detected by operational robots. We explore the performance of the proposed algorithm both on a real world multirobot system and in simulation. We show that failed robots are detected correctly and in a timely manner, and we show that a system composed of robots with simulated self-repair capabilities can survive relatively high failure rates.

Swarm robotics: a review from the swarm engineering perspective

“…Techniques to allow robots to autonomously detect failures and faulty behaviors have been developed by exploiting the natural redundancy of swarm robotic systems. Christensen et al (2009) developed a swarm level fault detection behavior based on fireflies synchronization. All the robots in the swarm are emitting a signal in a synchronous way.…”

System for deployment of groups of unmanned micro aerial vehicles in GPS-denied environments using onboard visual relative localization

“…In particular, a hierarchical framework for planning and control of arbitrarily large swarms is proposed in [13]. Considerations influencing the fault tolerance of teams are discussed in [24] and various co-operation strategies for teams of MAVs solving multi-robot tasks are published in [25]. Finally, controllers for swarms of robots with limited communication requirements are described in [14] and [15], where the necessary conditions for swarm stability are described using a direct graph topology in [14], and a Lyapunov-like function is employed for convergence analysis of multi-robot systems in [15].…”

Fault-Tolerant Formation Driving Mechanism Designed for Heterogeneous MAVs-UGVs Groups

“…It solves the fault recovery problem through an isolation of the faulty robot from the swarm by neighbouring robots to protect the entire group. A fault detection method inspired by a light-based communication of fireflies, which spontaneously synchronize their rhythmic flashes, is presented in [26]. The method is based on analysing of anomalies from the synchronized light pulses of robots equipped with LEDs and light detectors.…”