Self-Organised Recruitment and Deployment with Aerial and Ground-Based Robotic Swarms

We tackle the problem of forming and deploying groups of robots in a dynamic task allocation scenario. In our approach, wheeled robots carry out tasks and flying robots coordinate the formation and subsequent deployment of groups of wheeled robots. Our recruitment system is based on simple probabilistic rules inspired by the aggregation behaviour of cockroaches under shelters. The system successfully forms stable groups of the desired size and copes with the dynamic addition and removal of either wheeled robots or tasks. The system includes a deadlock resolution mechanism that allows it to continue to function even when there are not enough wheeled robots to carry out all tasks simultaneously. As the robotic hardware is still under development, our experiments are conducted in a physically realistic embodied simulation environment.