Abstract
We propose a novel communication strategy inspired by explicit signaling mechanisms seen in vertebrates, in order to improve performance of self-organized flocking for a swarm of mobile robots. The communication strategy is used to make the robots match each other’s headings. The task of the robots is to coordinately move towards a common goal direction, which might stay fixed or change over time.
We perform simulation-based experiments in which we evaluate the accuracy of flocking with respect to a given goal direction. In our settings, only some of the robots are informed about the goal direction. Experiments are conducted in stationary and non-stationary environments. In the stationary environment, the goal direction and the informed robots do not change during the experiment. In the non-stationary environment, the goal direction and the informed robots are changed over time. In both environments, the proposed strategy scales well with respect to the swarm size and is robust with respect to noise.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Couzin, I.D., Krause, J., Franks, N.R., Levin, S.A.: Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move. Nature 433, 513–516 (2005)
King, A.J., Johnson, D.D.P., Van Vugt, M.: The origins and evolution of leadership. Current biology 19(19), 911–916 (2009)
Stewart, K.J., Harcourt, A.H.: Gorillas’ vocalizations during rest periods: signals of impending departure? Behaviour 130(1), 29–40 (1994)
Beekman, M., Fathke, R., Seeley, T.: How does an informed minority of scouts guide a honeybee swarm as it flies to its new home? Animal Behaviour 71(1), 161–171 (2006)
Camazine, S., Franks, N.R., Sneyd, J., Bonabeau, E., Deneubourg, J.L., Theraulaz, G.: Self-Organization in Biological Systems. Princeton University Press, Princeton (2001)
Reynolds, C.: Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. In: Stone, M.C. (ed.) SIGGRAPH 1987: Proc. of the 14th Annual Conference on Computer graphics and Interactive Techniques, pp. 25–34. ACM, New York (1987)
Matarić, M.J.: Interaction and Intelligent Behavior. PhD thesis, MIT, MA (1994)
Kelly, I., Keating, D.: Flocking by the fusion of sonar and active infrared sensors on physical autonomous robots. In: Proc. of the Third Int. Conf. on Mechatronics and Machine Vision in Practice, pp. 14–17 (1996)
Spears, W.M., Spears, D.F., Hamann, J.C., Heil, R.: Distributed, physiscs-based control of swarms of vehicles. Autonomous Robots 17, 137–162 (2004)
Holland, O., Woods, J., Nardi, R., Clark, A.: Beyond swarm intelligence: the ultraswarm. In: Proc. of the IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium, Piscataway, NJ, pp. 217–224. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2005)
Hayes, A., Dormiani-Tabatabaei, P.: Self-organized flocking with agent failure: Off-line optimization and demonstration with real robots. In: Proc. of the IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Piscataway, NJ, pp. 3900–3905. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2002)
Campo, A., Nouyan, S., Birattari, M., Groß, R., Dorigo, M.: Negotiation of goal direction for cooperative transport. In: Dorigo, M., Gambardella, L.M., Birattari, M., Martinoli, A., Poli, R., Stützle, T. (eds.) ANTS 2006. LNCS, vol. 4150, pp. 191–202. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Turgut, A.E., Çelikkanat, H., Gökçe, F., Şahin, E.: Self-organized flocking in mobile robot swarms. Swarm Intelligence 2(2), 97–120 (2008)
Çelikkanat, H., Turgut, A.E., Şahin, E.: Guiding a robot flock via informed robots. In: Asama, Kurokawa, Ota, Sekiyama (eds.) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2008), Berlin, Germany, pp. 215–225. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Reebs, S.G.: Can a minority of informed leaders determine the foraging movements of a fish shoal? Animal behaviour 59, 403–409 (2000)
Tanner, H.G., Jadbabaie, A., Pappas, G.J.: Stable flocking of mobile agents part II: Dynamic topology. In: Proc. of the 42nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Piscataway, NJ, vol. 2, pp. 2016–2021. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2003)
Roberts, J., Stirling, T., Zufferey, J., Floreano, D.: 2.5d infrared range and bearing system for collective robotics. In: Papanikolopoulos, N., Sugano, S., Chiaverini, S., Meng, M. (eds.) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Piscataway, NJ. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2009)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ferrante, E., Turgut, A.E., Mathews, N., Birattari, M., Dorigo, M. (2010). Flocking in Stationary and Non-stationary Environments: A Novel Communication Strategy for Heading Alignment. In: Schaefer, R., Cotta, C., Kołodziej, J., Rudolph, G. (eds) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN XI. PPSN 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6239. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15871-1_34
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15871-1_34
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15870-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15871-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)