This technical brief summarizes and extends our recently introduced control framework for stochastically allocating a swarm of robots among boundaries of circular regions. As in the previous work, a macroscopic model of the swarm population dynamics is used to synthesize robot control policies that establish and maintain stable predictable team sizes around region boundaries. However, this exte...

In this paper, we present property-driven design, a novel top-down design method for robot swarms based on prescriptive modeling and model checking. Traditionally, robot swarms have been developed using a codeand-fix approach: in a bottom-up iterative process, the developer tests and improves the individual behaviors of the robots until the desired collective behavior is obtained. The code-and-...

This paper focuses on parameter identification of a target tracker robot possessing flexible joints using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Since, belt and pulley mechanisms are known as flexible joints in robotic systems, their elastic behavior affecting a tracker robot is investigated in this work. First, dynamic equations governing the robot behavior are extracted taking into acco...

We describe a new class of decentralised control algorithms that link local wireless connectivity to low-level robot motion control in order to maintain both swarm aggregation and connectivity, whichwe term “coherence”, in unbounded space.We investigate the potential of first-order and second-order connectivity information to maintain swarm coherence. For the second-order algorithm we show that...

Searching an area of interest based on environmental cues is a challenging benchmark task for an autonomous robot. It gets even harder to achieve if the goal is to aggregate a whole swarm of robots at such a target site after exhaustive exploration of the whole environment. When searching gas leakages or heat sources, swarm robotic approaches have been evaluated in recent years, which were, in ...

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Error detection and recovery are important issues in swarm robotics research, as they are a means by which fault tolerance can be achieved. Our previous work has looked at error detection for single failures in a swarm robotics scenario with the Receptor Density Algorithm. Three modes of failure to the wheels of individual robots was investigated and comparable performance to other statistical ...

Swarm robotics is an innovative approach to the control and coordination of a large number of multi-agent systems that use naturally inspired swarm intelligent methods to perform a task through emergent behaviors. A swarm based approach can decrease the complexity and the cost of designing a cooperative multi-robot system. This paper proposes a general engineering approach to develop a robotic ...

This paper is concerned with the problem of odor source localization using multi-robot system. A learning particle swarm optimization algorithm, which can coordinate a multi-robot system to locate the odor source, is proposed. First, in order to develop the proposed algorithm, a source probability map for a robot is built and updated by using concentration magnitude information, wind informatio...

In this paper, we describe a mobile distributed multirobot system and how it is used to measure an environment semiautonomously. The system contains a swarm of robots and a remote user computer for a human operator. The swarm has two kinds of robots; measurement robots and a group coordinator that delegates tasks to each robot. The measurement robots have different kinds of capabilities and sen...