DEVELOPMENT OF A SOCIAL REINFORCEMENT LEARNING BASED AGGREGATION METHOD WITH A MOBILE ROBOT SWARM

2022-9-09
Gür, Emre
In this thesis, the development of a social, reinforcement learning-based aggregation method is covered together with the development of a mobile robot swarm of Kobot- Tracked (Kobot-T) robots. The proposed method is developed to improve efficiency in low robot density swarm environments especially when the aggregated area is difficult to find. The method is called Social Reinforcement Learning, and Landmark-Based Aggregation (SRLA) and it is based on Q learning. In this method, robots share their Q tables inside the aggregated area. The developed robot swarm uses mostly off-the-shelf, open source, additive manufactured components and is extendable, and easily maintainable by design. Kobot-T is intended to be used together with a three-part heterogeneous swarm system capable of accomplishing tasks from foraging to aggregation for long hours. To prove and report the success of SRLA several aggregation methods from the literature are tested and the result of the comparison is given

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Citation Formats
E. Gür, “DEVELOPMENT OF A SOCIAL REINFORCEMENT LEARNING BASED AGGREGATION METHOD WITH A MOBILE ROBOT SWARM,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.