Controlling the Operation of a Robot Society through Distributed Environment Sensing

Societies are formed as collaborative structures to execute tasks that are not possible or are otherwise difficult for individuals alone. There are many types of biological societies, but societies formed by machines or robots are still rare. The concept offers, however, interesting possibilities especially in applications where a long term fully autonomous operation is needed and/or the work to be done can be executed in a parallel way by a group of individuals. The control system for a distributed autonomous robotic system can easily become highly complex. It is normally based on extensive bi-directional communication with a central controller and a guidance of individual robots. When the number of robots increases, the operator’s task becomes difficult. A concept, called robot society, with a flexible operator interface is presented, allowing easy handling of large amount of robots. The operation of the whole society with exploring and foraging as its task is controlled by varying the autonomousity level according to the environment information received from the society members.