SWARM-BOT: A Swarm of Autonomous Mobile Robots with Self-Assembling Capabilities

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.

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Mirco Dorigo, Dario Floreano, Luca Maria Gambardella, André Guignard, Francesco Mondada
2002
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https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/63934?ln=fr

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This paper presents a new robotic concept, called SWARM-BOT, based on a swarm of autonomous mobile robots with self-assembling capabilities. SWARM-BOT takes advantage from collective and distributed approaches to ensure robustness to failures and to hard environment conditions in tasks such as navigation, search and transportation in rough terrain. One SWARM-BOT is composed of a number of simpler robots, called s-bots, physically interconnected. The SWARM-BOT is provided with self-assembling and self-reconfiguring capabilities whereby s-bots can connect and disconnect forming large flexible structures. This paper introduces the SWARM-BOT concept and describes its implementation from a mechatronic perspective.

IEEE Press2003

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SWARM-BOT: a New Distributed Robotic Concept

Mirco Dorigo, Dario Floreano, Luca Maria Gambardella, André Guignard, Francesco Mondada

The swarm intelligence paradigm has proven to have very interesting properties such as robustness, flexibility and ability to solve complex problems exploiting parallelism and self-organization. Several robotics implementations of this paradigm confirm that these properties can be exploited by the control of a population of physically independent mobile robots. We present a new robotic concept called swarmbot where the collective interaction exploited by the swarm intelligence mechanism goes beyond the control layer and is extended at the physical level. This implies the addition of new mechanical functionalities on the single robot, together with new electronics and software to manage it. These new functionalities, even if not directly related with mobility and navigation, allows to address complex mobile robotics problems, such as extreme all-terrain exploration. This performance is achieved by exploiting the swarm intelligence mechanism. We finally show that we can simulate and implement this new concept, providing the necessary tools to open new directions in swarm intelligence research.

2004

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Towards Group Transport by Swarms of Robots

Roderich Gross

We examine the ability of a swarm robotic system to transport cooperatively objects of different shapes and sizes. We simulate a group of autonomous mobile robots that can physically connect to each other and to the transported object. Controllers — artificial neural networks — are synthesised by an evolutionary algorithm. They are trained to let the robots self-assemble, that is, organise into collective physical structures, and transport the object towards a target location. We quantify the performance and the behaviour of the group. We show that the group can cope fairly well with objects of different geometries as well as with sudden changes in the target location. Moreover, we show that larger groups, which are made of up to 16 robots, make possible the transport of heavier objects. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the system in terms of task complexity, scalability, and fault tolerance, and point out potential directions for future research.

2009

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