A Robotic Swarm for Spill Finding and Perimeter Formation

摘要

This paper addresses issues surrounding deployment and tasking of a real-world collective of costeffective,rnsmall mobile robots. To escape the limitations of centralized control, this project distributesrncontrol using an innovative, multi-modal communication architecture including acoustical chirping,rninfrared, and radio frequency transmissions. This paper reports on the use of social potential fields –rnattractive and repulsive fields emitted by each robot -- as a means to coordinate group behavior andrnpromote the emergence of swarm intelligence as seen in a colony of ants or swarm of bees. A suite of C2rntools, AgentTools, has been developed to enable an operator to inject high-level domain knowledge andrnguidance into the behavior of the otherwise autonomous robots. The resulting system permits the user torninteract with functional groups, rather than issuing commands to each individual robot. Using the realworldrnrobot collective and C2 system, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory hasrnperformed experiments to empirically analyze the benefits and limitations associated with the use of manyrnsmall-scale robots. Experimental results point to fundamental advantages of distributed systems andrnindicate that our real-world implementation of social potential fields scales well to varying numbers ofrnrobots and improves performance in terms of time and reliability.