Adaptation and Awareness in Robot Ensembles: Scenarios and Algorithms

This chapter presents a disaster recovery scenario that has been used throughout the ASCENS project as a reference to coordinate the study of distributed algorithms for robot ensembles. We first introduce the main traits and open problems in the design of behaviors for robot ensembles. We then present the scenario, highlighting its generality as a framework to compare algorithms and methodologies for distributed robotics. Subsequently, we summarize the main results of the research conducted in ASCENS that used the scenario. Finally, we describe an example algorithm that solves a selected problem in the scenario. The algorithm demonstrates how awareness at the ensemble level can be obtained without requiring awareness at the individual level.