Abstract
We implement a self-organized flocking behavior in a group of mobile robots and analyze its transition from an aligned state to an unaligned state. We briefly describe the robot and the simulator platform together with the observed flocking dynamics. By experimenting with robotic and numerical systems, we find that an aligned-to-unaligned phase transition can be observed in both physical and simulated robots as the noise level is increased, and that this transition depends on the characteristics of the heading sensors. We extend the Vectorial Network Model to approximate the robot dynamics and show that it displays an equivalent phase transition. By computing analytically the critical noise value and numerically the steady state solutions of this model, we show that the model matches well the results obtained using detailed physics-based simulations.
The works of A.E. Turgut, F. Gökçe and E. Şahin are supported by TÜBİTAK under grant no: 104E066. The work of C. Huepe is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DMS-0507745. H.Çelikkanat acknowledges the partial support of the TÜBİTAK graduate student research grant. F. Gökçe is currently enrolled in Faculty Development Program (ÖYP) in Middle East Technical University on behalf of Süleyman Demirel University.
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Turgut, A.E., Huepe, C., Çelikkanat, H., Gökçe, F., Şahin, E. (2008). Modeling Phase Transition in Self-organized Mobile Robot Flocks. In: Dorigo, M., Birattari, M., Blum, C., Clerc, M., Stützle, T., Winfield, A.F.T. (eds) Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5217. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87527-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87527-7_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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