A Robotic Swarm for Spill Finding and Perimeter Formation

This paper addresses issues surrounding deployment and tasking of a real-world collective of cost-effective, small mobile robots. To escape the limitations of centralized control, this project distributes control using an innovative, multi-modal communication architecture including acoustical chirpi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bruemmer, David J, Dudenhoeffer, Donald D, McKay, Mark D, Anderson, Matthew O
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
ARCHITECTURE
BEHAVIOR
COMMUNICATION AND RADIO SYSTEMS
CONTROL
COORDINATES
COST EFFECTIVENESS
Cybernetics
DISTRIBUTION
ENGINEERING
ENVIRONMENTS
GROUP DYNAMICS
LABORATORIES
LIMITATIONS
MOBILE
MULTIMODE
PARAMETERS
RADIO TRANSMISSION
RADIOFREQUENCY
RELIABILITY
ROBOTS
SELF OPERATION
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Summary:This paper addresses issues surrounding deployment and tasking of a real-world collective of cost-effective, small mobile robots. To escape the limitations of centralized control, this project distributes control using an innovative, multi-modal communication architecture including acoustical chirping, infrared, and radio frequency transmissions. This paper reports on the use of social potential fields - attractive and repulsive fields emitted by each robot -- as a means to coordinate group behavior and promote the emergence of swarm intelligence as seen in a colony of ants or swarm of bees. A suite of C2 tools, AgentTools, has been developed to enable an operator to inject high-level domain knowledge and guidance into the behavior of the otherwise autonomous robots. The resulting system permits the user to interact with functional groups, rather than issuing commands to each individual robot. Using the realworld robot collective and C2 system, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory has performed experiments to empirically analyze the benefits and limitations associated with the use of many small-scale robots. Experimental results point to fundamental advantages of distributed systems and indicate that our real-world implementation of social potential fields scales well to varying numbers of robots and improves performance in terms of time and reliability. Presneted at Spectrum 2002 Held in Reno, NV, August 2002. The original document contains color images. Supported in part by DARPA.