A Theoretical Approach Towards Optimizing the Movement of Catom Clusters in Micro Robotics Based on the Foraging Behaviour of Honey Bees

摘要

Claytronics is a future technology in the field of artificial intelligence and modular robotics to create programmable nanoscale robots (catoms). Each catom acts like a computer. It has the ability to adopt different shapes. Many methods are being used for the cluster formation of catoms and are mainly based on the message passing techniques. The energy consumed and the time delays taken in cluster formation are depending on the number of messages sent between catoms and the topology factor. In this paper, we report a new optimisation algorithm for cluster formation in claytronics. The proposed methodology is based on the foraging behaviour of the honey bee swarm. The algorithm introduces many user-defined functions for optimising the operations in cluster formation. It also minimises the number of message transfers among catoms and chooses a maximum topology factor value to form a particular shape. The paper theoretically analyses the operation of cluster formation and makes a comparison with previous methods. The analysis shows that our work optimises the energy and message transfer in the catom-cluster formation.