a specific technique which provides time-bound
responses to robots moving in dynamic, unstructured
and partially unknown environments.
The behaviour is defined to be a control law for
achieving and/or maintaining a particular goal.
Usually, robot agents have multiple goals. This
requires robot agents to be equipped with a number
of behaviours.
A behaviour-based approach assumes a robot to
be situated in, and surrounded by, its environment.
This means that a robot interacts with the world on
its own, without any human intervention, i.e. its
perspective is different from that of the observer.
The distinction between collective and
cooperative behaviour is made on the basis of
communication. Cooperation is a form of interaction
based on some form of communication.
The first, essential step enabling the emergence
of a collective behaviour is a careful design of the
behaviours that any individual robot agent will
contain. Further, one has to specify which tasks a
group of individual robots can accomplish. Last but
not least, a mechanism to initialize the cooperative
behaviour, eventually considering the level of
cooperative strategies the robots must follow to
collectively solve given tasks, is necessary. The
result of the actions provided by the individual
agents, whose activities must be coordinated to
cooperate and solve the global task, will be
emergence of a collective behaviour.
A large number of simple robots with limited
computational and communication capabilities can
be joined to form a multi-robot system (MRS).
Robots in an MRS can together fulfil difficult tasks
surpassing the capability of a single robot. As they
can be made robust, adaptable and still low cost,
there have been a large number of successful
applications, such as cooperative localization and
mapping, collaborative search and rescue, collective
construction, etc.
Rescue robots are useful for rescuing jobs in
situations that are hazardous for human rescuers
(http://emdad1.20m.com). They can enter into gaps
and move through small holes, which is impossible
for humans and even trained dogs. Robots should
explore in collapsed structure, extract the map,
search for victims and report the location of victims
in map and way that rescue team can reach them.
The main task of rescue robots is to acquire
information about damaged area and victims
(Akiyama, Shimora, Takeuchi and Noda, 2010).
Getting the reliable information is given the first
priority in rescue activity for disaster mitigation.
An additional potential application of the
proposed model is for cordoning off hazardous
materials.
In order to traverse through a complex
environment, swarm robotic systems need to self-
organize themselves to form different yet suitable
shapes dynamically, to adapt to unknown
environments (D’Angelo, 2007). Insects are
particularly good at cooperatively solving multiple
complex tasks. For example, foraging for food far
away from the nest can be solved through relatively
simple behaviours in combination with
communication through pheromones. As task
complexity increases, however, it may become
difficult to determine the proper simple rules which
yield the desired emergent cooperative behaviour, or
to know if any such rules exist at all.
3 PROBLEM FORMULATION
A large range of research has been done by imitating
ideas from nature for designing control algorithms
for multi-robot system.
Multi-robot shape construction and pattern
formation, a typical task for MRSs, has been widely
studied. Algorithms in this research field can be
roughly divided into three groups: leader/neighbour-
following algorithms, potential field algorithms, and
nature-inspired algorithms.
Leader/neighbour-following algorithms require
that individual robots follow neighbours or leader
that knows the aim or target to which the team needs
to go. These following robots should get behind a
leader's root in a specific geometric relationship with
the ones they follow. The second group of multi-
robot shape construction algorithms is based on
potential field method. The basic idea of this group
of algorithms is that each robot moves under the
governance of the gradients of potential fields,
which are the sum of virtual attractive and repulsive
forces. The third group is represented by nature-
inspired algorithms.
The problem we are addressing is to entrap
stationary (in future also mobile) targets using a few
mobile robots, i.e. coordination mechanisms for the
distributed contamination boundary coverage
problem with a swarm of miniature robots. In the
proposed model, field vector-based area coverage is
used in combination with search and surround of
some targets distributed in the area. Basic simple
behaviours of the robots are:
area coverage
collision avoidance
search for a target
Multi-roboticSystemwithSelf-organizationforSearchofTargetsinCoveredArea
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