Cooperative Transportation Using Pheromone Agents

This paper presents an algorithm for cooperatively transporting objects by multiple robots without any initial knowledge. The robots are connected by communication networks, and the controlling algorithm is based on the pheromone communication of social insects such as ants. Unlike traditional pheromone based cooperative transportation, we have implemented the pheromone as mobile software agents that control the mobile robots corresponding to the ants. The pheromone agent has the vector value pointing to its birth location inside, which is used to guide a robot to the birth location. Since the pheromone agent can diffuse with migrations between robots as the same manner as physical pheromone, it can attract other robots scattering in a work field to the birth location. Once the robot finds an object, it briefly pushes the object, measuring the degree of the inclination of the object. The robot generates a pheromone agent with the vector value to pushing point suitable for suppressing the inclination of the object. The process of the pushes and generations of pheromone agents enables the efficient transportation of the object. We have implemented a simulator that follows our algorithm, and conducted experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.