Coordination platform for a swarm of mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper the automatic design of behaviors for a swarm of robots is explored. In order to build behaviors for robots automatically a computational platform is proposed. The proposed platform is composed by three major components. The first component is a description format which allows to specify robot properties, basic behaviors and tasks. The second component is a genetic programming implementation along with a physics-based simulator, this component builds in an automatic way expression trees which represent robot behaviors. The final component is a behaviors allocation module to assign expression trees to real robots. The proposed computational platform is deployed in a experimental manufacturing cell.