Towards a Reliable Set-Up for Bio-Inspired Collective Experiments with Real Robots

This paper describes a set of tools developed at our laboratory that provide a reliable setup for conducting bio-inspired experiments with real robots. We focus on the hardware tools needed to monitor team performances as well as those to achieve collective adaptive behaviours. We propose concrete solutions to some of the main problems in collective robotics. The four main results we derive are: rst, the hardware modular-ity of the miniature robot Khepera 1] allows us to build a exible setup ; second, the energy autonomy problem is solved in a reliable way for experimenting with real robots during several hours; third, the communication architecture among teammates and/or with a supervisor unit is designed to prevent bandwidth bottlenecks with bigger robot teams; fourth, the use of programmable active pucks (also called \seeds" below) extends the set of possible bio-inspired experiments without increasing the sensorial complexity of the robots. A simple bio-inspired collective experiment, the gathering and clustering of randomly distributed passive seeds, is presented as an example as well as a test-bed for the extended autonomy tool. The results are compared with those reported in 2, 3].