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Developing Embodied Agents for Education Applications with Accurate Synchronization of Gesture and Speech Read chapter Read first chapter

2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Overcoming Limited Onboard Sensing in Swarm Robotics Through Local Communication

Authors : Tiago Rodrigues, Miguel Duarte, Margarida Figueiró, Vasco Costa, Sancho Moura Oliveira, Anders Lyhne Christensen

Published in: Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XX

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

In swarm robotics systems, the constituent robots are typically equipped with simple onboard sensors of limited quality and range. In this paper, we propose to use local communication to enable sharing of sensory information between neighboring robots to overcome the limitations of onboard sensors. Shared information is used to compute readings for virtual, collective sensors that, to a control program, are indistinguishable from a robot’s onboard sensors. We evaluate two implementations of collective sensors: one that relies on sharing of immediate sensory information within a local frame of reference, and another that relies on sharing of accumulated sensory information within a global frame of reference. We compare performance of swarms using collective sensors with: (i) swarms in which robots only use their onboard sensors, and (ii) swarms in which the robots have idealized sensors. Our experimental results show that collective sensors significantly improve the swarm’s performance by effectively extending the capabilities of the individual robots.

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Footnotes
1
In preliminary experiments, we found that performance results are robust to moderate increases in the time-multiplication factor (up to 50 s).
 
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Metadata
Title
Overcoming Limited Onboard Sensing in Swarm Robotics Through Local Communication
Authors
Tiago Rodrigues
Miguel Duarte
Margarida Figueiró
Vasco Costa
Sancho Moura Oliveira
Anders Lyhne Christensen
Copyright Year
2015
Book
Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XX

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27542-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-27543-7

Copyright Year: 2015

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27543-7_10

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