Group behaviour control on dynamically reconfigurable robotic system

Abstract

Recently, distributed autonomous robotic system (DARS) has been attracting many researchers' interests. As one of the model of DARS, we proposed cellular robotic system (CEBOT). Like an organism of a living thing, the CEBOT is composed of a number of heterogeneous robotic units called 'cells'. Based on the concept of CEBOT, we have studied a flexible and adaptive multiple robot system by using a production transit model. In this model, we assume a number of mobile robots that have a few kinds of manipulators and variation of transportation ability according to the combination of the different manipulation functions. We suppose that by changing its combination appropriately against environment changes, the adaptability of the system can be improved. At first, we address the combination making and show the advantage of the proposed system. Generally, in a swarm-type robot system, we can find some sort of collective phenomena that are not defined in each robot's behaviour decision process. Oscillation is one of the typical collective properties emerged in DARS. In our model, the occurrence of oscillation affects the performance of transportation. Therefore, we need a way of controlling such collective property as well as the appropriate combination making. In this paper, we show the advantage of the dynamically reconfigurable robotic system and a control method of collective property through a computational simulation.