We investigate the use of wireless sensor motes as mobile deployable waypoints for swarm robot navigation in a foraging scenario. Each robot can deploy, retrieve, and optimize the location of the sensor motes. After deployment, the robots treat the sensor motes as nodes in a sparse graph, and store and retrieve multiple pheromones and flags locally in each of them. Pheromone information stored ...

Although much work has been done on designing autonomy and user interfaces for managing small teams of independent robots, much less is known about managing large-scale bio-inspired robot (BIRT) teams. In this paper, we explore human interaction with BIRT teams in an information foraging task. We summarize results from two small experiments that use two types of BIRT teams in a foraging task. T...

Task allocation is a complex and open problem for multi-robot systems and very especially if a priority is associated to each task. In this paper, we present a method to allocate tasks with priorities in a team of heterogeneous robots. The system is partially inspired on auction and thresholds-based methods and tries to determine the optimum number of robots that are needed to solve specific ta...

This paper describes a study in evolutionary robotics conducted completely in hardware without using simulations. The experiments employ on-line evolution, where robot controllers evolve on-the-fly in the robots’ environment as the robots perform their tasks. The main issue we consider is the feasibility of tackling a non-trivial task in a realistic timeframe. In particular, we investigate whet...

When is it profitable for robots to forage collectively? Here we compare the ability of swarms of simulated bio-inspired robots to forage either collectively or individually. The conditions under which recruitment (where one robot alerts another to the location of a resource) is profitable are characterised, and explained in terms of the impact of three types of interference between robots (phy...

To explore the effects of different simple communications strategies on performance of robot teams, we have conducted a set of foraging experiments using real robots (the Minnesota Distributed Autonomous Robotic Team). Our experimental results show that more complex communication strategies do not necessarily improve task completion times, but tend to reduce variance in performance.

We study task partitioning in the context of swarm robotics. Task partitioning is the decomposition of a task into subtasks that can be tackled by different workers. We focus on the case in which a task is partitioned into a sequence of subtasks that must be executed in a certain order. This implies that the subtasks must interface with each other, and that the output of a subtask is used as in...

ABSTRACT This paper is on erned with the multi-robot foraging problem, whi h has been des ribed as one of the anoni al problems for ooperative roboti s. In parti ular, the multi-robot transportation task in onstrained spa e environments is onsidered. We des ribe a simple algorithm whi h produ es bu ket brigade-like behavior, where the robots "hand o " resour es to ea h other, using only lo al s...

The chapter considers the method of probabilistic control of mobile robots navigating in random environments and mimicking the foraging activity of ants, which is widely accepted as optimal with respect to the environmental conditions. The control is based on the Tsetlin automaton, which is a minimal automaton demonstrating an expedient behavior in random environments. The suggested automaton i...