Underwater exploration is important for mapping out the oceans, environmental monitoring, and search and rescue, yet water represents one of the most challenging of operational environments. The CoCoRo project proposes to address these challenges using cognitive swarm intelligent systems. We present here CoCoRoSim, an underwater swarm robotics simulation used in designing underwater swarm robot...

In this paper a honeybee inspired collective-decision-making algorithm called BEECLUST is studied in a swarm of autonomous robots and the performance of the swarm is investigated in different conditions. The algorithm has low requirements thus it is promising for implementation in robots with low resources. Here the algorithm is applied in swarms of improved e-puck robots in three different con...

There are different forms of human-robot interactions, allowing a team of humans and robots to take advantage of skills of each team member. A relatively new area of research considers interactions between human and a team of robots, called a swarm of robots. This paper discusses possible forms of interactions in swarm robotics within the Guardians project. The paper particularly addresses the ...

Swarm robotics is about constructing and controlling swarms of autonomous robots that cooperate to perform tasks that go beyond the capabilities of the single robots in the swarm. In this talk, I will give an overview of recent and ongoing research in swarm robotics in my research lab, IRIDIA, at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles. In particular, I will present results obtained with homogeneous a...

In this paper, we study how and to what extent a self-organized mobile robot flock can be guided to move in a desired direction by informing some of the individuals within the flock. Specifically, we extend a flocking behavior that was shown to maneuver a swarm of mobile robots as a cohesive group in free space, avoiding obstacles. In its original form, the flock does not have a preferred direc...

This paper investigates the problem of target localizing by a communicating robotic swarm in an unknown environment. Robots have to collaboratively search for the target while avoiding obstacles in their way. Emphasis is given on how physical constraints such as obstacles and communication links affect the swarm’s operation. Finally, simulation results of the proposed system in a small scale ar...

In this paper we discuss the task of efficiently using ant-like robotic agents for covering a connected region on the Z grid, whose shape and size are unknown in advance, and which expands at a given rate. This is done using myopic robots, with no ability to directly communicate with each other, where each robot is equipped with only O(1) memory. We show that regardless of the algorithm used, a...

In this paper we study the time delays affecting the diffusion of information in an underwater heterogeneous robot swarm, considering a time-sensitive environment. In many situations each member of the swarm must update its knowledge about the environment as soon as possible, thus every effort to expand the knowledge horizon is useful. Otherwise critical information may not reach nodes far from...