1,677 research outputs found
Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review
This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied
to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied
evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough
description of the underlying concepts and mechanisms. The paper also presents
a comprehensive summary of research published in the field since its inception
(1999-2017), providing various perspectives to identify the major trends. In
particular, we identify a shift from considering embodied evolution as a
parallel search method within small robot collectives (fewer than 10 robots) to
embodied evolution as an on-line distributed learning method for designing
collective behaviours in swarm-like collectives. The paper concludes with a
discussion of applications and open questions, providing a milestone for past
and an inspiration for future research.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl
Simultaneous Deployment and Tracking Multi-Robot Strategies with Connectivity Maintenance
Multi robot teams composed by ground and aerial vehicles have gained
attention during the last years. We present a scenario where both types of
robots must monitor the same area from different view points. In this paper we
propose two Lloyd-based tracking strategies to allow the ground robots (agents)
follow the aerial ones (targets), keeping the connectivity between the agents.
The first strategy establishes density functions on the environment so that the
targets acquire more importance than other zones, while the second one
iteratively modifies the virtual limits of the working area depending on the
positions of the targets. We consider the connectivity maintenance due to the
fact that coverage tasks tend to spread the agents as much as possible, which
is addressed by restricting their motions so that they keep the links of a
Minimum Spanning Tree of the communication graph. We provide a thorough
parametric study of the performance of the proposed strategies under several
simulated scenarios. In addition, the methods are implemented and tested using
realistic robotic simulation environments and real experiments
Maintaining network connectivity and performance in robot teams
In this paper, we present an experimental study of strategies for maintaining end-to-end communication links for tasks such as surveillance, reconnaissance, and target search and identification, where team connectivity is required for situational awareness. Our main contributions are three fold: (a) We present the construction of a radio signal strength map that can be used to plan multi-robot tasks and also serve as useful perceptual information. We show how a nominal model of an urban environment obtained by aerial surveillance is used to generate strategies for exploration. (b) We present reactive controllers for communication link maintenance; and (c) we consider the differences between monitoring signal strength versus data throughput. Experimental results, obtained using our multi-robot testbed in three representative urban environments, are presented with each of our main contributions
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