Coordinated Motion

This chapter presents the first set of experiments, in which we exploit artificial evolution for the synthesis of self-organising behaviours for the swarm-bot. We focus on a particular problem, namely coordinated motion. As already mentioned in Section 3.1.1, this problem has been widely studied in the literature. However, in the swarm-bot case, it takes a different flavour, due to the physical connections among the s-bots, which open the way to study novel interaction modalities that can be exploited for coordination. Coordinated motion is a basic ability for the s-bots physically connected in a swarm-bot because, being independent in their control, they must coordinate their actions in order to choose a common direction of movement. This coordination ability is essential for an efficient motion of the swarm-bot as a whole, and constitutes a basic building block for the design of more complex behavioural strategies (see, for example, Chapter 7).

This chapter is organised as follows. In Section 6.1, we review some literature related to the presented work. Section 6.2 presents the experimental setup, while Section 6.3 analyses the functioning of the evolved controller. Section 6.4 describes how the evolved neural controller generalises its ability to produce coordinated motion in different conditions that were never tested during the evolutionary phase. In particular, this section provides evidence of the capability of the controller evolved in simulation to efficiently control the real robots. Finally, in Section 6.5 we discuss the main conclusions.