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Behavioral specialization emerges from the embodiment of a robotic swarm

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Abstract

This paper focuses on the effect of the embodiment of robots on collective behavior in robotic swarms. The research field of swarm robotics emphasizes the importance of the embodiment of robots; however, only a few studies have discussed how it influences the collective behavior of a robotic swarm. In this paper, a path-formation task is performed by robotic swarms in computer simulations with and without considering collisions among robots to discuss the effect of the robot embodiment. Additionally, the experiments were performed with varying the size of robots. The robot controllers were obtained by an evolutionary robotics approach. The results show that the robot collisions would affect not only the performance of the robotic swarm but also the emergent behavior to accomplish the task. The robot collisions seem to provide feedback on robotic swarms to emerge the division of labor among robots to manage congestion.

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Notes

  1. The experiments are conducted with the Box2D physics engine (available at http://box2d.org).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Engineering, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan

    Motoaki Hiraga & Kazuhiro Ohkura

  2. Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Yasumasa Tamura

Authors
  1. Motoaki Hiraga
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  2. Yasumasa Tamura
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  3. Kazuhiro Ohkura
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Correspondence to Kazuhiro Ohkura.

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This work was presented in part at the 3rd International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics (Okinawa, Japan, November 20–22, 2019).

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Hiraga, M., Tamura, Y. & Ohkura, K. Behavioral specialization emerges from the embodiment of a robotic swarm. Artif Life Robotics 25, 495–502 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-020-00641-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-020-00641-3

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