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Towards an Engineering Science of Robot Foraging

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Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 8

Abstract

Foraging is a benchmark problem in robotics - especially for distributed autonomous robotic systems. The systematic study of robot foraging is important for several reasons: firstly, because foraging is a metaphor for the broad class of problems integrating robotic exploration, navigation and object identification, manipulation and transport; secondly, in multi-robot systems foraging is a canonical problem for the study of robot-robot cooperation; and thirdly, many and diverse actual or potential real-world applications for robotics are instances of foraging robots, for example, for cleaning, harvesting, search and rescue, landmine clearance or planetary astrobiology. This paper sets out a theoretical framework, structured upon an abstract model and taxonomy of robot foraging. A framework which, it is hoped, might provide the basis of a principled approach to the engineering of future real-world robot foraging systems.

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Winfield, A.F.T. (2009). Towards an Engineering Science of Robot Foraging. In: Asama, H., Kurokawa, H., Ota, J., Sekiyama, K. (eds) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 8. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00644-9_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00644-9_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-00643-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-00644-9

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