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Overcoming Limited Onboard Sensing in Swarm Robotics Through Local Communication

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Book cover Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XX

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TCCI,volume 9420))

Abstract

In swarm robotics systems, the constituent robots are typically equipped with simple onboard sensors of limited quality and range. In this paper, we propose to use local communication to enable sharing of sensory information between neighboring robots to overcome the limitations of onboard sensors. Shared information is used to compute readings for virtual, collective sensors that, to a control program, are indistinguishable from a robot’s onboard sensors. We evaluate two implementations of collective sensors: one that relies on sharing of immediate sensory information within a local frame of reference, and another that relies on sharing of accumulated sensory information within a global frame of reference. We compare performance of swarms using collective sensors with: (i) swarms in which robots only use their onboard sensors, and (ii) swarms in which the robots have idealized sensors. Our experimental results show that collective sensors significantly improve the swarm’s performance by effectively extending the capabilities of the individual robots.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In preliminary experiments, we found that performance results are robust to moderate increases in the time-multiplication factor (up to 50 s).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under the grants, SFRH/BD/76438/2011, EXPL/EEI-AUT/0329/2013 and UID/EEA/50008/2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bio-inspired Computation and Intelligent Machines Lab, 1649-026, Lisbon, Portugal

    Tiago Rodrigues, Miguel Duarte, Margarida Figueiró, Vasco Costa, Sancho Moura Oliveira & Anders Lyhne Christensen

  2. Instituto de Telecomunicações, 1049-001, Lisbon, Portugal

    Tiago Rodrigues, Miguel Duarte, Margarida Figueiró, Vasco Costa, Sancho Moura Oliveira & Anders Lyhne Christensen

  3. Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), 1649-026, Lisbon, Portugal

    Tiago Rodrigues, Miguel Duarte, Margarida Figueiró, Vasco Costa, Sancho Moura Oliveira & Anders Lyhne Christensen

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  1. Tiago Rodrigues
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  2. Miguel Duarte
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  3. Margarida Figueiró
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Correspondence to Tiago Rodrigues .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science and Manageme, Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland

    Ngoc Thanh Nguyen

  2. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia

    Ryszard Kowalczyk

  3. LERIA - UFR Sciences, Angers Cedex 01, France

    Béatrice Duval

  4. Leiden, Zuid-Holland, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Jaap van den Herik

  5. LERIA - UFR Sciences, Angers Cedex 01, France

    Stephane Loiseau

  6. INSTICC, Polytechnic Institute of Setubal, Setubal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

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Rodrigues, T., Duarte, M., Figueiró, M., Costa, V., Oliveira, S.M., Christensen, A.L. (2015). Overcoming Limited Onboard Sensing in Swarm Robotics Through Local Communication. In: Nguyen, N., Kowalczyk, R., Duval, B., van den Herik, J., Loiseau, S., Filipe, J. (eds) Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XX . Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9420. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27543-7_10

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