395 research outputs found
Urban Swarms: A new approach for autonomous waste management
Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the
increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is
waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions.
Swarm robotics systems have been attracting an increasing amount of attention
in the past years and they are expected to become one of the main driving
factors for innovation in the field of robotics. The research presented in this
paper explores the feasibility of a swarm robotics system in an urban
environment. By using bio-inspired foraging methods such as multi-place
foraging and stigmergy-based navigation, a swarm of robots is able to improve
the efficiency and autonomy of the urban waste management system in a realistic
scenario. To achieve this, a diverse set of simulation experiments was
conducted using real-world GIS data and implementing different garbage
collection scenarios driven by robot swarms. Results presented in this research
show that the proposed system outperforms current approaches. Moreover, results
not only show the efficiency of our solution, but also give insights about how
to design and customize these systems.Comment: Manuscript accepted for publication in IEEE ICRA 201
Stigmergy in Web 2.0: a model for site dynamics
Building Web 2.0 sites does not necessarily ensure the success of the site. We aim to better understand what improves the success of a site by drawing insight from biologically inspired design patterns. Web 2.0 sites provide a mechanism for human interaction enabling powerful intercommunication between massive volumes of users. Early Web 2.0 site providers that were previously dominant are being succeeded by newer sites providing innovative social interaction mechanisms. Understanding what site traits contribute to this success drives research into Web sites mechanics using models to describe the associated social networking behaviour. Some of these models attempt to show how the volume of users provides a self-organising and self-contextualisation of content. One model describing coordinated environments is called stigmergy, a term originally describing coordinated insect behavior. This paper explores how exploiting stigmergy can provide a valuable mechanism for identifying and analysing online user behavior specifically when considering that user freedom of choice is restricted by the provided web site functionality. This will aid our building better collaborative Web sites improving the collaborative processes
Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems
Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to
unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to
safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as
unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system.
This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about
MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be
backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on
testing and simulation.
We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step
towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of
an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify
both the specification of these systems and the verification of their
properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and
their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and
implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare
effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of
expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin
Urban Swarms: A new approach for autonomous waste management
Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm robotics systems have been attracting an increasing amount of attention in the past years and they are expected to become one of the main driving factors for innovation in the field of robotics. The research presented in this paper explores the feasibility of a swarm robotics system in an urban environment. By using bio-inspired foraging methods such as multi-place foraging and stigmergy-based navigation, a swarm of robots is able to improve the efficiency and autonomy of the urban waste management system in a realistic scenario. To achieve this, a diverse set of simulation experiments was conducted using real-world GIS data and implementing different garbage collection scenarios driven by robot swarms. Results presented in this research show that the proposed system outperforms current approaches. Moreover, results not only show the efficiency of our solution, but also give insights about how to design and customize these systems
Multi‑Agent Foraging: state‑of‑the‑art and research challenges
International audienceThe foraging task is one of the canonical testbeds for cooperative robotics, in which a collection of robots has to search and transport objects to specific storage point(s). In this paper, we investigate the Multi-Agent Foraging (MAF) problem from several perspectives that we analyze in depth. First, we define the Foraging Problem according to literature definitions. Then we analyze previously proposed taxonomies, and propose a new foraging taxonomy characterized by four principal axes: Environment, Collective, Strategy and Simulation, summarize related foraging works and classify them through our new foraging taxonomy. Then, we discuss the real implementation of MAF and present a comparison between some related foraging works considering important features that show extensibility, reliability and scalability of MAF systems. Finally we present and discuss recent trends in this field, emphasizing the various challenges that could enhance the existing MAF solutions and make them realistic
Computational Chemotaxis in Ants and Bacteria over Dynamic Environments
Chemotaxis can be defined as an innate behavioural response by an organism to
a directional stimulus, in which bacteria, and other single-cell or
multicellular organisms direct their movements according to certain chemicals
in their environment. This is important for bacteria to find food (e.g.,
glucose) by swimming towards the highest concentration of food molecules, or to
flee from poisons. Based on self-organized computational approaches and similar
stigmergic concepts we derive a novel swarm intelligent algorithm. What strikes
from these observations is that both eusocial insects as ant colonies and
bacteria have similar natural mechanisms based on stigmergy in order to emerge
coherent and sophisticated patterns of global collective behaviour. Keeping in
mind the above characteristics we will present a simple model to tackle the
collective adaptation of a social swarm based on real ant colony behaviors (SSA
algorithm) for tracking extrema in dynamic environments and highly multimodal
complex functions described in the well-know De Jong test suite. Later, for the
purpose of comparison, a recent model of artificial bacterial foraging (BFOA
algorithm) based on similar stigmergic features is described and analyzed.
Final results indicate that the SSA collective intelligence is able to cope and
quickly adapt to unforeseen situations even when over the same cooperative
foraging period, the community is requested to deal with two different and
contradictory purposes, while outperforming BFOA in adaptive speed. Results
indicate that the present approach deals well in severe Dynamic Optimization
problems.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, in CEC 07 - IEEE Congress on Evolutionary
Computation, ISBN 1-4244-1340-0, pp. 1009-1017, Sep. 200
An Energy-Aware Algorithm for Large Scale Foraging Systems
International audienceThe foraging task is one of the canonical testbeds for cooperative robotics, in which a collection of coordinated robots have to find and transport one or more objects to one or more specific storage points. Swarm robotics has been widely considered in such situations, due to its strengths such as robustness, simplicity and scalability. Typical multi-robot foraging systems currently consider tens to hundreds of agents. This paper presents a new algorithm called Energy-aware Cooperative Switching Algorithm for Foraging (EC-SAF) that manages thousands of robots. We investigate therefore the scalability of EC-SAF algorithm and the parameters that can affect energy efficiency overtime. Results indicate that EC-SAF is scalable and effective in reducing swarm energy consumption compared to an energy-aware version of the reference well-known c-marking algorithm (Ec-marking)
Bio-inspired Mechanisms for Artificial Self-organised Systems
Research on self-organization tries to describe and explain forms, complex patterns and behaviours that arise from a collection of entities without an external organizer. As researchers in artificial systems, our aim is not to mimic self-organizing phenomena arising in Nature, but to understand and to control underlying mechanisms allowing desired emergence of forms, complex patterns and behaviours. In this paper we analyze three forms of self-organization: stigmergy, reinforcement mechanisms and cooperation. For each forms of self-organisation, we present a case study to show how we transposed it to some artificial systems and then analyse the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach
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