Self-Organized Coordinated Motion in Groups of Physically Connected Robots

By Gianluca Baldassarre, Vito Trianni, Michael Bonani, Francesco Mondada, Marco Dorigo, Stefano Nolfi. 2007

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An important goal of collective robotics is the design of control systems that allow groups of robots to accomplish common tasks by coordinating without a centralized control. In this paper, we study how a group of physically assembled robots can display coherent behavior on the basis of a simple neural controller that has access only to local sensory information. This controller is synthesized through artificial evolution in a simulated environment in order to let the robots display coordinated-motion behaviors. The evolved controller proves to be robust enough to allow a smooth transfer from simulated to real robots. Additionally, it generalizes to new experimental conditions, such as different sizes/shapes of the group and/or different connection mechanisms. In all these conditions the performance of the neural controller in real robots is comparable to the one obtained in simulation

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Levent Bayindir
2. Marco Dorigo
3. Mauro Birattari
4. Eliseo Ferrante
5. Manuele Brambilla

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Levent Bayindir
2. Marco Dorigo
3. Mauro Birattari
4. Manuele Brambilla

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Levent Bayindir
2. Marco Dorigo

Citations in the corpus

• A review of swarm robotics tasks (2016, methodology): “For example, sbots self-assemble using the gripper unit which is mounted on a turret that can rotate with respect to the robot chassis; in [169, 171, 176], to align their chassis assembled robots use their traction sensors as inputs to a neural controller which is synthesized with artificial evoluti”
• Swarm robotics: a review from the swarm engineering perspective (2013, methodology): “Within swarm robotics, ER has been used in many proof-of-concept tasks in order to test the effectiveness of the method (Baldassarre et al. 2007; Groß and Dorigo 2008a; Sperati et al. 2008) or as a tool to answer some more fundamental scientific questions (Trianni and Dorigo 2006; Tuci et al. 2004;…”