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The swarm within the labyrinth: planar construction by a robot swarm

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Abstract

We propose an approach to guide simple robots through arbitrary environments while engaged in a planar construction task. The intent is to mitigate spatial interference between robots which often occurs in distributed robots operating on the same set of objects. Information can also be encoded within the structure of the labyrinth to provide auxiliary guidance, such as the direction in which objects should be incrementally moved to reach their goals. We show results in a simulation environment and study the impact of the number of robots deployed. We also provide validation on physical robots.

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Notes

  1. CWaggle: https://github.com/davechurchill/cwaggle, our fork: https://github.com/avardy/unicurse_cwaggle.

  2. https://www.pololu.com/docs/0J63.

  3. https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-a-plus.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada

    Andrew Vardy

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  1. Andrew Vardy
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Correspondence to Andrew Vardy.

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This work was submitted and accepted for the Journal Track of the joint symposium of the 28th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, the 8th International Symposium on BioComplexity, and the 6th International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics (Beppu, Oita, January 25-27, 2023).

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Vardy, A. The swarm within the labyrinth: planar construction by a robot swarm. Artif Life Robotics 28, 117–126 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-022-00849-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-022-00849-5

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