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Automatic Design of Communication-Based Behaviors for Robot Swarms

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Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11172))

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Abstract

We introduce Gianduja, an automatic design method that generates communication-based behaviors for robot swarms. Gianduja extends Chocolate, a previously published design method. It does so by providing the robots with the capability to communicate using one message. The semantics of the message is not a priori fixed. It is the automatic design process that implicitly defines it, on a per-mission basis, by prescribing the conditions under which the message is sent by a robot and how the receiving peers react to it. We empirically study Gianduja on three missions and we compare it with the aforementioned Chocolate and with EvoCom, a rather standard evolutionary robotics method that generates communication-based behaviors. We evaluate the behaviors produced by the three automatic design methods on a swarm of 20 e-puck robots. The results show that Gianduja uses communication meaningfully and effectively in all the three missions considered. The aggregate results indicate that, on the three missions considered, Gianduja performs significantly better than the two other methods under analysis.

The proposed method was implemented and tested by KH. The experiments were designed by the three authors. This paper was drafted by KH, refined by MB, and revised by the three authors. The research was conceived and directed by MB.

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Acknowledgements

The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 681872). Mauro Birattari acknowledges support from the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Ken Hasselmann & Mauro Birattari

  2. BEAMS, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Frédéric Robert

Authors
  1. Ken Hasselmann
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  2. Frédéric Robert
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  3. Mauro Birattari
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mauro Birattari .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Marco Dorigo

  2. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Mauro Birattari

  3. Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Bellaterra, Spain

    Christian Blum

  4. University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Anders L. Christensen

  5. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Andreagiovanni Reina

  6. National Research Council, Rome, Italy

    Vito Trianni

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Hasselmann, K., Robert, F., Birattari, M. (2018). Automatic Design of Communication-Based Behaviors for Robot Swarms. In: Dorigo, M., Birattari, M., Blum, C., Christensen, A., Reina, A., Trianni, V. (eds) Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11172. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00533-7_2

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