title: Self-organized coordinated motion in groups of physically connected robots.
abstract: An important goal of collective robotics is the design of control systems that allow groups of robots to accomplish common tasks by coordinating without a centralized control. In this paper, we study how a group of physically assembled robots can display coherent behavior on the basis of a simple neural controller that has access only to local sensory information. This controller is synthesized through artificial evolution in a simulated environment in order to let the robots display coordinated-motion behaviors. The evolved controller proves to be robust enough to allow a smooth transfer from simulated to real robots. Additionally, it generalizes to new experimental conditions, such as different sizes/shapes of the group and/or different connection mechanisms. In all these conditions the performance of the neural controller in real robots is comparable to the one obtained in simulation.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Autonomous Robotics and Artificial Life, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 00185 Rome, Italy. gianluca.baldassarre@istc.cnr.it
authors.forename: Gianluca
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Baldassarre
authors.forename: Vito
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Trianni
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bonani
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Mondada
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dorigo
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nolfi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D032701:Biomimetics / Q000379:methods*; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D009038:Motion; D009068:Movement; D012371:Robotics / Q000379:methods*