核心概念
Automatic design methods can effectively generate control software for robot swarms that must coordinate with and interact with other pre-programmed robots in their environment.
摘要
The paper investigates the automatic design of robot swarms that must perform missions by interacting with other robots in their environment. The authors frame this problem within the context of robot shepherding, where a group of "shepherd" robots must coordinate a larger group of "sheep" robots.
The authors use two automatic design methods, Pistacchio and EvoCMY, to generate the control software for the shepherd robots. The sheep robots operate with pre-defined fixed control software, which is unknown to the automatic design process.
The authors conduct experiments in simulation across nine scenarios that combine different shepherding missions (aggregation, dispersion, herding) with different sheep behaviors (attraction, repulsion, attraction & repulsion). The results show that the automatic design methods are effective in identifying and exploiting the dynamics between the shepherds and sheep to perform the missions effectively. The automatically designed control software outperforms manual design and a simple random walk baseline.
The authors discuss how the automatic methods leverage color signaling and coordination between the shepherds to enable successful shepherding behaviors, adapting to the different sheep behaviors. They also highlight how this work demonstrates the ability of automatic design to address heterogeneous scenarios where multiple robot swarms with different control architectures must operate collectively.
統計資料
The average distance from each sheep to the center of mass of all sheep at the end of the mission.
The number of sheep that remain out of the four target locations at the end of the mission.
引述
"Automatic design is a viable approach to producing swarms that operate in environments populated by other robots."
"The automatic methods leveraged color signaling and coordination between the shepherds to enable successful shepherding behaviors, adapting to the different sheep behaviors."