Physical interactions in swarm robotics: the hand-bot case study

This paper presents a case-study on the performance achieved by the mechanical interactions of self-assembling mobile robots. This study is based on the hand-bot robot, designed to operate within heterogeneous swarms of robots. The hand-bot is specialized in object manipulation and can improve its performance by exploiting physical collaborations by self-assembling with other hand-bots or with foot-bots (ground robots). The paper analyzes the achieved performance and demonstrates the highly super-linear properties of the accessible volume in respect to the number of robots. These extremely interesting performances are strongly linked to the self-assembling mechanisms and the physical nature of the interaction, and do not scale to a large number of robots. Finally, this study suggests that such interesting properties are more accessible for heterogeneous systems or devices achieving complex tasks.

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Hannes Bleuler, Michael Bonani, Stéphane Magnenat, Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz
Springer, 2012
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https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/175472?ln=fr

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Robotique

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La robotique en essaim est une branche de la robotique appliquant les méthodes d'intelligence distribuée aux systèmes à plusieurs robots. Il s'agit généralement d'utiliser des robots simples, voire

Scripting the swarm: event-based control of microcontroller-based robots.

Stéphane Magnenat, Francesco Mondada, Basilio Noris, Philippe Rétornaz

Swarm robotics in real world requires a large number of robots and thus enough room for experimentation. Therefore, to implement such experiments with limited budget, robots should be compact and low cost, which entails the use of microcontroller-based miniature robots. In this context, developing behaviour is challenging, because microcontrollers are not powerful enough to support common high-level development environments such as Java. Furthermore, the development tools for microcontrollers are not able to monitor and debug groups of robots online. In this paper, we present a new event-based control architecture: ASEBA. It solves the problem of developing and testing collective behaviours by running script inside a lightweight virtual machine on each microcontroller and by providing an integrated development environment to program and monitor the whole group of robots from a single application running on any desktop computer. We have validated ASEBA by implementing a dangerous-area avoidance experiment using the e-puck robot. Experiments of this type are common in swarm robotics, but porting them to real robots is often challenging. By easing the development of complex behaviours on real robots, ASEBA both exposes collective robotics programming to a large community and opens new research perspectives for swarm robotics.

2008

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Cooperative navigation in robotic swarms

Michael Bonani, Stéphane Magnenat, Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz

We study cooperative navigation for robotic swarms in the context of a general event-servicing scenario. In the scenario, one or more events need to be serviced at specific locations by robots with the required skills. We focus on the question of how the swarm can inform its members about events, and guide robots to event locations. We propose a solution based on delay-tolerant wireless communications: by forwarding navigation information between them, robots cooperatively guide each other towards event locations. Such a collaborative approach leverages on the swarm’s intrinsic redundancy, distribution, and mobility. At the same time, the forwarding of navigation messages is the only form of cooperation that is required. This means that the robots are free in terms of their movement and location, and they can be involved in other tasks, unrelated to the navigation of the searching robot. This gives the system a high level of flexibility in terms of application scenarios, and a high degree of robustness with respect to robot failures or unexpected events. We study the algorithm in two different scenarios, both in simulation and on real robots. In the first scenario, a single searching robot needs to find a single target, while all other robots are involved in tasks of their own. In the second scenario, we study collective navigation: all robots of the swarm navigate back and forth between two targets, which is a typical scenario in swarm robotics. We show that in this case, the proposed algorithm gives rise to synergies in robot navigation, and it lets the swarm self-organize into a robust dynamic structure. The emergence of this structure improves navigation efficiency and lets the swarm find shortest paths.

Springer Verlag2013

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We present a new robotic concept, called SWARM-BOT, based on a swarm of small and simple autonomous mobile robots called S-BOTs. S-BOTs have a particular assembling capability that allows them to connect physically to other S-BOTs and form a bigger robot entity, the SWARM-BOT. A SWARM-BOT is typically composed by 10 to 30 S-BOTs physically interconnected. S-BOTs can autonomously assemble into a SWARM-BOT but also disassemble again. This feature of the S-BOTs provides SWARM-BOT with self-assembling and self-reconfiguring capabilities. Such a concept, by taking advantage from the collective and distributed approaches, ensures robustness to failures even in hard environment conditions. The approach presented finds its theoretical roots in recent studies on swarm intelligence.

2002

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