Flocking in stationary and non-stationary environments: A novel communication strategy for heading alignment

Eliseo Ferrante*, Ali Emre Turgut, Nithin Mathews, Mauro Birattari, Marco Dorigo

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

We propose a novel communication strategy inspired by explicit signaling mechanisms seen in vertebrates, in order to improve performance of self-organized flocking for a swarm of mobile robots. The communication strategy is used to make the robots match each other's headings. The task of the robots is to coordinately move towards a common goal direction, which might stay fixed or change over time. We perform simulation-based experiments in which we evaluate the accuracy of flocking with respect to a given goal direction. In our settings, only some of the robots are informed about the goal direction. Experiments are conducted in stationary and non-stationary environments. In the stationary environment, the goal direction and the informed robots do not change during the experiment. In the non-stationary environment, the goal direction and the informed robots are changed over time. In both environments, the proposed strategy scales well with respect to the swarm size and is robust with respect to noise.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationParallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN XI - 11th International Conference, Proceedings
Pages331-340
Number of pages10
EditionPART 2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Nov 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event11th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2010 - Krakow, Poland
Duration: 11 Sept 201015 Sept 2010

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
NumberPART 2
Volume6239 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference11th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2010
Country/TerritoryPoland
CityKrakow
Period11/09/1015/09/10

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