Co-evolution of a multiple autonomous robot system and its working environment via intelligent local information storage

Abstract

This paper proposes a new strategy of evolution and adaptation of a population of multiple autonomous mobile robots to make multi-robot systems more flexible and robust against unpredictable environmental conditions and human operator's capricious commands, and to overcome the limitation of biologically inspired techniques which need a certain degree of redundancy and diversity. The important idea of the strategy is to utilize the advantageous parallelism of the multi-robot system and immobile but portable devices (data carriers) for information storage and management. A device named IDC (Intelligent Data Carrier) is developed with a unique mushroom-like structure to be easily handled by a forklift mechanism which can be mounted on actual mobile robots. The handling method of the IDC unit, which should be essential to realization of the proposed strategy, is examined through the experiment using an omni-directional mobile robot, and the robot succeeded in placing the unit at an appropriate location. With the demonstrated handling technique, the robots can adapt and evolve as a population by accessing locally available information which is stored and processed in the IDC unit.