A robotic validation of the attractive field model: An inter-disciplinary model of self-regulatory social systems

Abstract

Division of labour in multi-robot systems or multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) is a challenging research issue. We propose to solve this MRTA problem using a set of previously published generic rules for division of labour derived from the observation of ant, human and robotic social systems. These bottom-up rules describe the phenomenon of self-regulated division of labour in terms of attractive fields between robots and tasks. The concrete form of these rules, the attractive filed model, avoids the strong dependence on local interactions found in many existing approaches to MRTA. We present experimental results that constitute a first validation of attractive filed model as a mechanism for MRTA and as a multi-disciplinary model of self-organisation in social systems. Our experiments used 16 e-puck robots in a 2m x 2m area. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.