INTERFERENCE REDUCTION THROUGH TASK PARTITIONING IN A ROBOTIC SWARM - Or: "Don't you Step on My Blue Suede Shoes!"

Giovanni Pini, Arne Brutschy, Mauro Birattari, Marco Dorigo

2009

Abstract

This article studies the use of task partitioning as a way to reduce interference in a spatially constrained harvesting task. Interference is one of the key problems in large cooperating groups. We present a simple method to allocate individuals of a robotic swarm to a partitioned task, and show that task partitioning can increase system performance by reducing sources of interference. The method is experimentally studied, both in an environment with a narrow area and an environment without this constraint. The results are analyzed and compared to the case in which task partitioning is not employed.

References

  1. Campo, A. and Dorigo, M. (2007). Efficient multi-foraging in swarm robotics. In Advances in Artificial Life: Proceedings of the VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence LNAI 4648, pages 696-705, Berlin, Germany. Springer Verlag.
  2. Gerkey, B. P. and Mataric, M. J. (2004). A formal analysis and taxonomy of task allocation in multi-robot systems. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 23(9):939-954.
  3. Goldberg, D. (2001). Evaluating the Dynamics of AgentEnvironment Interaction. PhD thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
  4. Goldberg, D. and Mataric, M. J. (2003). Maximizing reward in a non-stationary mobile robot environment. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 6(3):287- 316.
  5. Groß, R., Bonani, M., Mondada, F., and Dorigo, M. (2006). Autonomous self-assembly in swarm-bots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 22(6):1115-1130.
  6. Kalra, N. and Martinoli, A. (2006). A comparative study of market-based and threshold-based task allocation. In Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS), Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
  7. Krieger, M. J. B. and Billeter, J.-B. (2000). The call of duty: Self-organised task allocation in a population of up to twelve mobile robots. Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 30:65-84.
  8. Labella, T. H., Dorigo, M., and Deneubourg, J.-L. (2006). Division of labor in a group of robots inspired by ants' foraging behavior. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, 1(1):4-25.
  9. Lein, A. and Vaughan, R. (2008). Adaptive multi-robot bucket brigade foraging. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Artificial Life (ALife XI), pages 337-342, Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
  10. Lerman, K. and Galstyan, A. (2002). Mathematical model of foraging in a group of robots: Effect of interference. Auton. Robots, 13(2):127-141.
  11. Liu, W., Winfield, A., Sa, J., Chen, J., and Dou, L. (2007). Towards energy optimization: Emergent task allocation in a swarm of foraging robots. Adaptive Behavior, 15(3):289-305.
  12. Mondada, F., Pettinaro, G. C., Guignard, A., Kwee, I. V., Floreano, D., Deneubourg, J.-L., Nolfi, S., Gambardella, L. M., and Dorigo, M. (2004). SWARMBOT: A new distributed robotic concept. Autonomous Robots, 17(2-3):193-221.
  13. Nouyan, S., Campo, A., and Dorigo, M. (2008). Path formation in a robot swarm. Self-organized strategies to find your way home. Swarm Intelligence, 2(1):1-23.
  14. Rosenfeld, A., Kaminka, G. A., and Kraus, S. (2005). A study of scalability properties in robotic teams. In Coordination of Large-Scale Multiagent Systems, pages 27-51, New York. Springer Verlag.
  15. Shell, D. and Mataric, M. J. (2006). On foraging strategies for large-scale multi-robot systems. In Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, pages 2717-2723, Beijing, China.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Pini G., Brutschy A., Birattari M. and Dorigo M. (2009). INTERFERENCE REDUCTION THROUGH TASK PARTITIONING IN A ROBOTIC SWARM - Or: "Don't you Step on My Blue Suede Shoes!" . In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 1: ICINCO, ISBN 978-989-674-000-9, pages 52-59. DOI: 10.5220/0002195200520059


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco09,
author={Giovanni Pini and Arne Brutschy and Mauro Birattari and Marco Dorigo},
title={INTERFERENCE REDUCTION THROUGH TASK PARTITIONING IN A ROBOTIC SWARM - Or: "Don't you Step on My Blue Suede Shoes!"},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 1: ICINCO,},
year={2009},
pages={52-59},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002195200520059},
isbn={978-989-674-000-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 1: ICINCO,
TI - INTERFERENCE REDUCTION THROUGH TASK PARTITIONING IN A ROBOTIC SWARM - Or: "Don't you Step on My Blue Suede Shoes!"
SN - 978-989-674-000-9
AU - Pini G.
AU - Brutschy A.
AU - Birattari M.
AU - Dorigo M.
PY - 2009
SP - 52
EP - 59
DO - 10.5220/0002195200520059