Cooperative self-organization in a heterogeneous swarm robotic system

Abstract

We study how a swarm robotic system consisting of two different types of robots can solve a foraging task. The first type of robots are small wheeled robots, called foot-bots, and the second type are flying robots that can attach to the ceiling, called eye-bots. While the foot-bots perform the actual foraging, i.e. they move back and forth between a source and a target location, the eye-bots are deployed in stationary positions against the ceiling, with the goal of guiding the foot-bots. The key component of our approach is a process of mutual adaptation, in which foot-bots execute instructions given by eye-bots, and eye-bots observe the behavior of foot-bots to adapt the instructions they give. Through a simulation study, we show that this process allows the system to find a path for foraging in a cluttered environment. Moreover, it is able to converge onto the shortest of two paths, and spread over different paths in case of congestion. Since our approach involves mutual adaptation between two sub-swarms of different robots, we refer to it as cooperative self-organization. This is to our knowledge the first work that investigates such a system in swarm robotics.