Automatic Design of Collective Behaviors for Robots that Can Display and Perceive Colors

David Garzón Ramos,Mauro Birattari

doi:10.3390/app10134654

Abstract

Research in swarm robotics has shown that automatic design is an effective approach to realize robot swarms. In automatic design methods, the collective behavior of a swarm is obtained by automatically configuring and fine-tuning the control software of individual robots. In this paper, we present TuttiFrutti: an automatic design method for robot swarms that belongs to AutoMoDe—a family of methods that produce control software by assembling preexisting software modules via optimization. The peculiarity of TuttiFrutti is that it designs control software for e-puck robots that can display and perceive colors using their RGB LEDs and omnidirectional camera. Studies with AutoMoDe have been so far restricted by the limited capabilities of the e-pucks. By enabling the use of colors, we significantly enlarge the variety of collective behaviors they can produce. We assess TuttiFrutti with swarms of e-pucks that perform missions in which they should react to colored light. Results show that TuttiFrutti designs collective behaviors in which the robots identify the colored light displayed in the environment and act accordingly. The control software designed by TuttiFrutti endowed the swarms of e-pucks with the ability to use color-based information for handling events, communicating, and navigating.

Highlights

A robot swarm [1,2] is a group of robots that operate autonomously without relying on a leader robot or on external infrastructures
This is apparent both in the entity of the performance drop we measured and in the fact that the collective behaviors of the control software generated by EvoColor are often dramatically differently in simulation and in the real world, while the ones of the control software generated by TuttiFrutti are essentially unchanged
We introduced AutoMoDe-TuttiFrutti—an automatic method to design collective behaviors for robots that can perceive and communicate color-based information

Summary

Introduction

A robot swarm [1,2] is a group of robots that operate autonomously without relying on a leader robot or on external infrastructures. The robots of a swarm can collectively accomplish missions that individual robots could not accomplish alone. The collective behavior of a robot swarm—and its ability to accomplish a particular mission—is the result of the interactions that the robots have with the environment and with their peers [3]. Conceiving and implementing a collective behavior for a robot swarm is challenging. To obtain a collective behavior, one must conceive and implement the control software of the individual robots. The problem is that no generally applicable method exists to tell what an individual robot should do so that the desired behavior is obtained [4]. Automatic design is a promising approach to address this problem. An automatic design method produces control software via an optimization algorithm that maximizes an appropriate mission-dependent objective function

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion