Self-organisation and communication in groups of simulated and physical robots

Abstract

In social insects, both self-organisation and communication play a crucial role for the accomplishment of many tasks at a collective level. Communication is performed with different modalities, which can be roughly classified in three classes: indirect (stigmergic) communication, direct interactions and direct communication. The use of stigmergic communication is predominant in social insects (e.g., the pheromone trails in ants), where however also direct interactions (e.g., antennation in ants) and direct communication (e.g., the waggle dance in honey bees) can be observed. Taking inspiration from insect societies, we present an experimental study of self-organising behaviours for a group of robots, which exploit communication to coordinate their activities. Artificial evolution is responsible for the synthesis in a simulated environment of the robot's neural controllers, which are subsequently tested on physical robots. We study different communication strategies among the robots: no direct communication, handcrafted signalling and a completely evolved approach. We show that the latter is the most efficient, suggesting that artificial evolution can produce behaviours that are more adaptive than those obtained with conventional design methodologies. Moreover, we show that the evolved controllers produce a self-organising systems that is robust enough to be tested on physical robots, notwithstanding the huge gap between simulation and reality.

Socially-Mediated Negotiation for Obstacle Avoidance in Collective Transport

“…Trianni et al [13] studied a task similar to obstacle avoidance in collective transport. They call it collective hole-avoidance.…”

Evolution of Implicit and Explicit Communication in Mobile Robots

“…The theoretical approach and the methodology followed in this chapter is in line with the first Chapter of this section and with the work of Baldassarre et al (2003);Di Paolo (1997; Marocco and Nolfi (2007);Quinn (2001) ;Quinn et al (2003); Trianni and Dorigo (2006). However, the experimental scenario proposed here is more advanced than in the experimental works mentioned above with respect to the following aspects (or with respect to the possibility to study the following aspects in combination): (i) the complexity of the chosen task that allows us to study how several behavioural and communication skills are developed and co-adapted during the evolutionary process, (ii) the richness of the agents' sensory-motor system that supports, for example, the exploitation of both explicit and implicit communication, (iii) the validation of the results obtained in simulation in hardware.…”

Evolving Communication in Embodied Agents: Assessment and Open Challenges

“…In particular, the experiments reported in (Trianni and Dorigo, 2006) demonstrated how the possibility to regulate when the signal are produced significantly impacts the performance of the agents even when the characteristics of the signal are predetermined by the experimenter and kept fixed during the adaptive process. Moreover, the analysis of the experiments reported in Chapter ??…”