Guiding a Robot Flock via Informed Robots

Date

2008-11-19

Author

Celikkanat, Hande
Turgut, Ali Emre
Şahin, Erol

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

149
views

0
downloads

In this paper, we study how and to what extent a self-organized mobile robot flock can be guided to move in a desired direction by informing some of the individuals within the flock. Specifically, we extend a flocking behavior that was shown to maneuver a swarm of mobile robots as a cohesive group in free space avoiding obstacles in its path. In its original form, this behavior does not have a preferred direction and the flock would wander aimlessly in the environment. In this study, we extend the flocking behavior by "informing" some of the individuals about the desired direction that we wish the swarm to move. The informed robots do not signal that they are "informed" (a.k.a. unacknowledged leadership) and instead guide the rest of the swarm by their tendency to move in the desired direction. Through experimental results obtained from physical and simulated robots we show that the self-organized flocking of a swarm of robots can be effectively guided by a minority of informed robots within the flock. In our study, we use two metrics to measure the accuracy of the flock in following the desired direction, and the ability to stay cohesive meanwhile. Using these metrics, we show that the proposed behavior is scalable with respect to the flock's size, and that the accuracy of guidance increases with 1) the "stubbornness" of the informed robots to align with the preferred direction, and 2) the ratio of the number of informed robots over the whole flock size.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/36060

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00644-9_19

Collections

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Conference / Seminar

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Steering self-organized robot flocks through externally guided individuals Celikkanat, Hande; Şahin, Erol (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2010-09-01) In this paper, we study how a self-organized mobile robot flock can be steered toward a desired direction through externally guiding some of its members. Specifically, we propose a behavior by extending a previously developed flocking behavior to steer self-organized flocks in both physical and simulated mobile robots. We quantitatively measure the performance of the proposed behavior under different parameter settings using three metrics, namely, (1) the mutual information metric, adopted from Information ...
Control of a mobile robot swarm via informed robots Çelikkanat, Hande; Şahin, Erol; Department of Computer Engineering (2008) In this thesis, we study how and to what extent a self-organized mobile robot flock can be guided by informing some of the robots within the flock about a preferred direction of motion. Specifically, we extend a flocking behavior that was shown to maneuver a swarm of mobile robots as a cohesive group in free space, avoiding obstacles. In its original form, this behavior does not have a preferred direction and the flock would wander aimlessly. In this study, we incorporate a preference for a goal direction i...
Building a web of concepts on a humanoid robot Orhan, Güner; Kalkan, Sinan; Department of Computer Engineering (2014) In this thesis, an effective approach for predicting nouns, adjectives and verbs is introduced for more effective communication between a humanoid robot and a human actor. There are three important challenges addressed by our approach: The first one is the accurate prediction of words in language. Most of the existing robotics studies predict words in language using perceptual information only. However, due to noise and ambiguity in low-level sensory information, prediction using perceptual information is o...
Collective gradient perception with a flying robot swarm Karaguzel, Tugay Alperen; Turgut, Ali Emre; Eiben, A. E.; Ferrante, Eliseo (2022-10-01) In this paper, we study the problem of collective and emergent sensing with a flying robot swarm in which social interactions among individuals lead to following the gradient of a scalar field in the environment without the need of any gradient sensing capability. We proposed two methods-desired distance modulation and speed modulation-with and without alignment control. In the former, individuals modulate their desired distance to their neighbors and in the latter, they modulate their speed depending on th...
Unsupervised Learning of Affordance Relations on a Humanoid Robot Akgun, Baris; Dag, Nilguen; Bilal, Tahir; Atil, Ilkay; Şahin, Erol (2009-09-16) In this paper, we study how the concepts learned by a robot can be linked to verbal concepts that humans use in language. Specifically, we develop a simple tapping behaviour on the iCub humanoid robot simulator and allow the robot to interact with a set of objects of different types and sizes to learn affordance relations in its environment. The robot records its perception, obtained from a range camera, as a feature vector, before and after applying tapping on an object. We compute effect features by subtr...

Citation Formats

H. Celikkanat, A. E. Turgut, and E. Şahin, “Guiding a Robot Flock via Informed Robots,” 2008, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/36060.