Deployment Environment for a Swarm of Heterogeneous Robots

The objective of this work is to develop a framework that can deploy and provide coordination between multiple heterogeneous agents when a swarm robotic system adopts a decentralized approach; each robot evaluates its relative rank among the other robots in terms of travel distance and cost to the g...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tamer Abukhalil, Madhav Patil, Sarosh Patel, Tarek Sobh
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2016-10-01
Series:Robotics
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/2218-6581/5/4/22
Description
Summary:The objective of this work is to develop a framework that can deploy and provide coordination between multiple heterogeneous agents when a swarm robotic system adopts a decentralized approach; each robot evaluates its relative rank among the other robots in terms of travel distance and cost to the goal. Accordingly, robots are allocated to the sub-tasks for which they have the highest rank (utility). This paper provides an analysis of existing swarm control environments and proposes a software environment that facilitates a rapid deployment of multiple robotic agents. The framework (UBSwarm) exploits our utility-based task allocation algorithm. UBSwarm configures these robots and assigns the group of robots a particular task from a set of available tasks. Two major tasks have been introduced that show the performance of a robotic group. This robotic group is composed of heterogeneous agents. In the results, a premature example that has prior knowledge about the experiment shows whether or not the robots are able to accomplish the task.
ISSN:2218-6581