Deployment of Heterogeneous Swarm Robotic Agents Using a Task-Oriented Utility-Based Algorithm

In a swarm robotic system, the desired collective behavior emerges from local decisions made by robots, themselves, according to their environment. Swarm robotics is an emerging area that has attracted many researchers over the last few years. It has been proven that a single robot with multiple capabilities cannot complete an intended job within the same time frame as that of multiple robotic agents. A swarm of robots, each one with its own capabilities, are more flexible, robust, and cost-effective than an individual robot. As a result of a comprehensive investigation of the current state of swarm robotic research, this dissertation demonstrates how current swarm deployment systems lack the ability to coordinate heterogeneous robotic agents. Moreover, this dissertation's objective shall define the starting point of potential algorithms that lead to the development of a new software environment interface. This interface will assign a set of collaborative tasks to the swarm system without being concerned about the underlying hardware of the heterogeneous robotic agents. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a task-oriented software application that facilitates the rapid deployment of multiple robotic agents. The task solutions are created at run-time, and executed by the agents in a centralized or decentralized fashion. Tasks are fractioned into smaller sub-tasks which are, then, assigned to the optimal number of robots using a novel Robot Utility Based Task Assignment (RUTA) algorithm. The system deploys these robots using it's application program interfaces (API's) and uploads programs that are integrated with a small routine code. The embedded routine allows robots to configure solutions when the decentralized approach is adopted. In addition, the proposed application also offers customization of robotic platforms by simply defining the available sensing and actuation devices. Another objective of the system is to improve code and component reusability to reduce efforts in deploying tasks to swarm robotic agents. Usage of the proposed framework prevents the need to redesign or rewrite programs should any changes take place in the robot's platform

UB Robot Swarm System: Design and Implementation

In this poster we described the hardware architecture of an inexpensive, heterogeneous, mobile robot swarm, designed and developed at RISC lab, University of Bridgeport. Each UB robot swarm is equipped with sensors, actuators, control and communication units, power supply, and interconnection mechanism. Robot swarms have become a new research paradigm in the last ten years offering novel approaches, such as self-reconfigurabity, self-assembly, self-replication and self-learning. Developing a multi-agent robot system with heterogeneity and larger behavioral repertoire is a great challenge. This robot swarm is capable of performing user defined tasks such as wall painting, mapping, human rescue operations, task allocation, obstacle avoidance, and object transportation

UBSwarm: Design of a Software Environment to Deploy Multiple Decentralized Robots

This article presents a high-level configuration and task assignment software package that distributes algorithms on a swarm of robots. The software allows the robots to operate in a swarm fashion. When the swarm robotic system adopts a decentralized approach, the desired collective behaviors emerge from local decisions made by the robots themselves according to their environment. Using its GUI, the proposed system expects the operator to select between several available robot agents and assign the swarm of robots a particular task from a set of available tasks

Hardware Architecture Review of Swarm Robotics System: Self-Reconfigurability, Self-Reassembly, and Self-Replication

Swarm robotics is one of the most fascinating and new research areas of recent decades, and one of the grand challenges of robotics is the design of swarm robots that are self-sufficient. This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as the inside of a blood vessel, a collapsed building, the deep sea, or the surface of another planet. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on hardware architecture and several other important aspects of modular swarm robots, such as self-reconfigurability, self-replication, and self-assembly. The key factors in designing and building a group of swarm robots are cost and miniaturization with robustness, flexibility, and scalability. In robotics intelligence, self-assembly and self-reconfigurability are among the most important characteristics as they can add additional capabilities and functionality to swarm robots. Simulation and model design for swarm robotics is highly complex and expensive, especially when attempting to model the behavior of large swarm robot groups.http://dx.doi.org/10.5402/2013/84960

Coordinating a Heterogeneous Robot Swarm Using Robot Utility-based Task Assignment (RUTA)

The goal of this work is the development of a task-oriented software application that facilitates the rapid deployment of multiple robotic agents. The task solutions are created at run-time and executed by the agents in a centralized or decentralized fashion. Tasks are divided into smaller subtasks which are then assigned to the optimal number of robots using Robot Utility Based Task Assignment (RUTA) algorithm. The system deploys these robots using its application program interfaces (API’s) and uploads programs that are integrated with a small routine code. The embedded routine allows robots to configure solutions when decentralized approach is adopted

UB robot swarm — Design, implementation, and power management

In this paper we describe the hardware architecture of an inexpensive, heterogeneous robot swarm, designed and developed at the RISC lab, University of Bridgeport. Each swarm robot is equipped with sensors, actuators, control and communication units, power supply, and interconnection mechanism. This article also describes the essential features and design of a power distribution and management system for a dynamically reconfigurable system. It further presents the empirical results of the proposed power management system collected with the real robotic applications