Experimental Characteristics of Multiple-Robots Behaviors in Communication Network Expansion and Object-Fetching

Abstract

This paper deals with the experimental characteristics of the behaviors appeared in the multi-robot system consisted of low-level intelligent robots and the major factors governing the emerged behaviors. We assign the task to search for and to carry a target back to the nest to the mulit-robot system. The task is divided into sub-tasks such as to search for the route toward the target and to carry it back to the nest area. To accomplish each of the sub-tasks the multi-robot system constructs a communication network in the given area, and when a single robot of the multi-robot system finds the target then the robot returns to its start area along the communication network. The robots have no global information about the location of the target, boundaries and itself. We examine experimentally the characteristics of the object-fetching behaviors in the multi-robot system consisting of 40 hardware robots with respect to some of important indexes expressing the performance of the mulit-robot system for each of the sub-tasks such as route-searching and nest-returning behaviors.