Cooperative object transport with a swarm of e-puck robots: robustness and scalability of evolved collective strategies
Cooperative object transport with a swarm of e-puck robots: robustness and scalability of evolved collective strategies
复制标题
DOI：
10.1007/s11721-017-0135-8
复制
发表时间：
2017-12-01
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Tuci, Elio
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Alkilabi, Muhanad H. Mohammed;Narayan, Aparajit;Tuci, Elio
分布式多机器人系统中的协同物体运输需要一组自主机器人的推/拉力的协调和同步，以运输单个代理无法运输的物品。这项研究的结果表明，配备相对简单的感官设备（即没有力传感器和直接通信设备）的机器人可以产生相当强大和可扩展的集体运输策略。在本文所描述的实验中，为了将一个重的长方体物体尽可能远地从其起始位置移动到任意方向，需要同质的物理e-puck机器人群体协调和同步它们的动作。机器人由采用进化计算技术合成的动态神经网络控制。最佳进化控制器展示了一种有效的群体传输策略，该策略对对象的物理特性（即对象质量和最长对象侧的大小）的可变性具有鲁棒性，并可扩展到不同的群体大小。为了进行这些实验，我们在机器人上设计、制造并安装了一个新的传感器，该传感器可以在二维平面上返回代理的位移。研究表明，机器人的传感器产生的相对于物体运动的反馈足以让机器人协调他们的努力，并维持一段时间的运输。通过广泛分析成功的行为策略，我们说明了在群体运输过程中支撑行动协调和同步的操作机制的本质。
Cooperative object transport in distributed multi-robot systems requires the coordination and synchronisation of pushing/pulling forces by a group of autonomous robots in order to transport items that cannot be transported by a single agent. The results of this study show that fairly robust and scalable collective transport strategies can be generated by robots equipped with a relatively simple sensory apparatus (i.e. no force sensors and no devices for direct communication). In the experiments described in this paper, homogeneous groups of physical e-puck robots are required to coordinate and synchronise their actions in order to transport a heavy rectangular cuboid object as far as possible from its starting position to an arbitrary direction. The robots are controlled by dynamic neural networks synthesised using evolutionary computation techniques. The best evolved controller demonstrates an effective group transport strategy that is robust to variability in the physical characteristics of the object (i.e. object mass and size of the longest object's side) and scalable to different group sizes. To run these experiments, we designed, built, and mounted on the robots a new sensor that returns the agents' displacement on a 2D plane. The study shows that the feedback generated by the robots' sensors relative to the object's movement is sufficient to allow the robots to coordinate their efforts and to sustain the transports for an extended period of time. By extensively analysing successful behavioural strategies, we illustrate the nature of the operational mechanisms underpinning the coordination and synchronisation of actions during group transport.