ICRA 2024 | Automatically designing robot swarms in environments populated by other robots

David Garzón Ramos and Mauro Birattari (2024). "Automatically designing robot swarms in environments populated by other robots: an experiment in robot shepherding". 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

Abstract:
Automatic design is a promising approach to realizing robot swarms. Given a mission to be performed by the swarm, an automatic method produces the required control software for the individual robots. Automatic design has concentrated on missions that a swarm can execute independently, interacting only with a static environment and without the involvement of other active entities. In this paper, we investigate the design of robot swarms that perform their mission by interacting with other robots that populate their environment. We frame our research within robot shepherding: the problem of using a small group of robots—the shepherds—to coordinate a relatively larger group—the sheep. In our study, the group of shepherds is the swarm that is automatically designed, and the sheep are pre-programmed robots that populate its environment. We use automatic modular design and neuroevolution to produce the control software for the swarm of shepherds to coordinate the sheep. We show that automatic design can leverage mission-specific interaction strategies to enable an effective coordination between the two groups.

Find us:
David Garzón Ramos
https://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~dgarzonramos
Twitter: @dgarzonramos

The Demiurge, IRIDIA, ULB
https://demiurge.be
Twitter: @Demiurge_ULB

The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (DEMIURGE: grant No. 681872) and from Belgium’s Wallonia-Brussels Federation through a ARC Advanced Project 2020 (Guaranteed by Optimization). The authors acknowledge support from Toyota Motor Europe.

Mauro Birattari acknowledges support from the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique–FNRS.

David Garzón Ramos acknowledges support from the Colombian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation–Minciencias

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