一种基于个体评估能力的Stigmergic群体搭建机制

A stigmergic collective construction mechanism based on individual assessment

群体搭建任务研究一群机器人如何以分散控制的方式并行搭建出具有几何形状的砖块结构.相对于群机器人学中的其他任务,群体搭建研究特别注重搭建过程的时空协调.作为一种以环境为媒介进行间接交互的时空协调机制,Stigmergy被认为更具一般性与通用性.传统方法通过同时感知多邻域信息或利用结构对称性来制定复杂规则,但其并不十分适用于非模块结构以及序列结构.本文针对此类结构提出了基于个体评估能力的Stigmergic群体搭建时空协调机制,该协调机制可通过赋予个体感知环境、评估系统当前状态的能力来简化对搭建规则的依赖,即个体利用简单搭建规则即可完成群体搭建任务,实现群体搭建过程时空的协调.仿真实验结果表明提出的机制是可行且有效的.

Collective construction concerns with the building of a geometric structure with a collection of robots working in parallel, without centralized control. Compared with other problem domains in swarm robotics, col- lective construction pays more attention to the spatio-temporal coordination during construction. The Stigmergy mechanism achieves its spatio-temporal coordination through environment-mediated indirect interaction~ and can be regarded as a more general method. The aim of a robot swarm in this paper is to build non-modular or highly sequential structures. During the building process, spatio-temporal coordination is required. The attempt to minimize the number of rules and block types is not considered, because the approach to it, e.g., devising complex rules that simultaneously consider more adjacent blocks or make use of the symmetry of the structure, works less effective for these non-modular or highly sequential structures. An individual assessment-based Stigmergic collec- tive construction mechanism has been proposed. Construction robots in the swarm have the capability of sensing the environment and determining the current state of the building process, such that robots are not required to reply on the complex construction rules, instead, a basic rule set will suffice to build the desired structure. Experimental results demonstrated that robots using the proposed mechanism can successfully build the desired structure and achieve the spatio-temporal coordination during construction.