AutoMoDe: A Modular Approach to the Automatic Off-Line Design and Fine-Tuning of Control Software for Robot Swarms

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Mauro Birattari ◽  
Antoine Ligot ◽  
Gianpiero Francesca
Keyword(s):  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Modular Approach ◽  
Control Software ◽  
Robot Swarms ◽  
Line Design

scholarly journals Automatic Design of Collective Behaviors for Robots that Can Display and Perceive Colors

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (13) ◽  
pp. 4654 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Garzón Ramos ◽  
Mauro Birattari
Keyword(s):  
Collective Behavior ◽  
Swarm Robotics ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Automatic Design ◽  
Control Software ◽  
Collective Behaviors ◽  
Robot Swarms ◽  
Software Modules ◽  
Automatic Design Methods

Research in swarm robotics has shown that automatic design is an effective approach to realize robot swarms. In automatic design methods, the collective behavior of a swarm is obtained by automatically configuring and fine-tuning the control software of individual robots. In this paper, we present TuttiFrutti: an automatic design method for robot swarms that belongs to AutoMoDe—a family of methods that produce control software by assembling preexisting software modules via optimization. The peculiarity of TuttiFrutti is that it designs control software for e-puck robots that can display and perceive colors using their RGB LEDs and omnidirectional camera. Studies with AutoMoDe have been so far restricted by the limited capabilities of the e-pucks. By enabling the use of colors, we significantly enlarge the variety of collective behaviors they can produce. We assess TuttiFrutti with swarms of e-pucks that perform missions in which they should react to colored light. Results show that TuttiFrutti designs collective behaviors in which the robots identify the colored light displayed in the environment and act accordingly. The control software designed by TuttiFrutti endowed the swarms of e-pucks with the ability to use color-based information for handling events, communicating, and navigating.

scholarly journals Concurrent design of control software and configuration of hardware for robot swarms under economic constraints

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. e221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Salman ◽  
Antoine Ligot ◽  
Mauro Birattari
Keyword(s):  
Automatic Design ◽  
Control Software ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Robot Swarm ◽  
Software Configuration ◽  
Robot Swarms ◽  
Battery Capacity ◽  
Finite State ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Economic Constraints

Designing a robot swarm is challenging due to its self-organized and distributed nature: complex relations exist between the behavior of the individual robots and the collective behavior that results from their interactions. In this paper, we study the concurrent automatic design of control software and the automatic configuration of the hardware of robot swarms. We introduce Waffle, a new instance of the AutoMoDe family of automatic design methods that produces control software in the form of a probabilistic finite state machine, configures the robot hardware, and selects the number of robots in the swarm. We test Waffle under economic constraints on the total monetary budget available and on the battery capacity of each individual robot comprised in the swarm. Experimental results obtained via realistic computer-based simulation on three collective missions indicate that different missions require different hardware and software configuration, and that Waffle is able to produce effective and meaningful solutions under all the experimental conditions considered.

AutoMoDe: A novel approach to the automatic design of control software for robot swarms

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianpiero Francesca ◽  
Manuele Brambilla ◽  
Arne Brutschy ◽  
Vito Trianni ◽  
Mauro Birattari
Keyword(s):  
Automatic Design ◽  
Control Software ◽  
Robot Swarms ◽  
Novel Approach

scholarly journals Towards an integrated automatic design process for robot swarms

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 112
Author(s):  
Darko Bozhinoski ◽  
Mauro Birattari
Keyword(s):  
Design Process ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Integrated Design ◽  
Automatic Design ◽  
Control Software ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
Robot Swarm ◽  
Robot Swarms ◽  
Integrated Design Process ◽  
Optimization Based Design

Background: The specification of missions to be accomplished by a robot swarm has been rarely discussed in the literature: designers do not follow any standardized processes or use any tool to precisely define a mission that must be accomplished. Methods: In this paper, we introduce a fully integrated design process that starts with the specification of a mission to be accomplished and terminates with the deployment of the robots in the target environment. We introduce Swarm Mission Language (SML), a textual language that allows swarm designers to specify missions. Using model-driven engineering techniques, we define a process that automatically transforms a mission specified in SML into a configuration setup for an optimization-based design method.  Upon completion, the output of the optimization-based design method is an instance of control software that is eventually deployed on real robots. Results: We demonstrate the fully integrated process we propose on three different missions. Conclusions: We aim to show that in order to create reliable, maintainable and verifiable robot swarms,  swarm designers need to follow standardised automatic design processes that will facilitate the design of control software in all stages of the development.

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