Abstract-Ants pheromone communication is an efficient mechanism which took inspiration from nature. It has been used in various artificial intelligence and multi robotics researches. This paper presents the development of an autonomous micro robot to be used in swarm robotic researches especially in pheromone based communication systems. The robot is an extended version of Colias micro robot with capability of decoding and following artificial pheromone trails. We utilize a low-cost experimental setup to implement pheromone-based scenarios using a flat LCD screen and a USB camera. The results of the performed experiments with group of robots demonstrated the feasibility of Colias-Φ to be used in pheromone based experiments.
Abstract. Autonomous mobile robots are promising tools for operations in environments that are difficult to access for humans. When these environments are dynamic and non-deterministic, like in collapsed buildings, the robots must coordinate their actions and the use of resources using planning. This paper presents Planner9, a hierarchical task network (htn) planner that runs on groups of miniature mobile robots. These robots have limited computational power and memory, but are well connected through Wi-Fi. Planner9 takes advantage of this connectivity to distribute the planning over different robots. We have adapted the htn algorithm to perform parallel search using A* and to limit the number of search nodes through lifting. We show that Planner9 scales well with the number of robots, even on non-linear tasks that involve recursions in their decompositions. We show that contrary to JSHOP2, Planner9 finds optimal plans.
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