Teamwork by swarms of all terrain mobile robots

Abstract

The classic monolithic design of robot agents shows all its limits when tasks require capabilities which go beyond those initially planned. Robot collaboration seems to be a possible answer to the otherwise ever increasing complexity of mechanical and electrical design. Swarm robotics, by exploiting the power of interaction among members, offers such an answer. Simple units can in fact collaborate in achieving their common goal without the need of being aware at all of the rest of the group. The resilience achieved in this way makes the paradigm very appealing in all those applications, where mechanical or software failure may jeopardise the success of the overall mission. The present work summarizes the ongoing research which is being carried out by the author and his team. The hardware and software employed as well as some application experiments are described and discussed.

A stakeholder framework for evaluating the ‐ilities of autonomous behaviors in complex adaptive systems

“…Space exploration, aerial surveillance, underwater operations, and traffic congestion challenges can be approached by implementing autonomous unmanned systems since the autonomy is independent of any specific domain 1,2 . Autonomous unmanned systems can handle problems such as changing environmental conditions, navigating unexplored terrains, reaching uninhabitable places, and becoming force multipliers for human operators 3 . For man to explore the unknown, handle natural disasters, and go where humans cannot physically survive, autonomous unmanned systems can provide significant improvements to these desired operator capabilities.…”

Adaptive distributed fetching and retrieval of goods by a swarm-bot

“…The macroscopic behavior, which is indeed regarded as intelligent, stems merely from the primitive interactions occurring among its members, which are promptly reactive but not necessarily capable of any global form of planning. All of these characteristics make robot swarms apt for tasks requiring high adaptability to the environment constraints, low sensitivity to hardware failures, low level of human monitoring, and high level of global resilience [15].…”

“…It can can be viewed as a colony of independent units capable of moving about on diverse terrains and of carrying out joint missions as if it were a whole entity [15], [21].…”