著者

Kazuho Kobayashi Takehiro Higuchi Seiya Ueno

出版者

International Society of Artificial Life and Robotics

雑誌

Proceedings of the Joint Symposium of AROB-ISBC-SWARM2023

巻号頁・発行日

pp.1491-1496, 2023-01-25

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This paper proposes a hierarchical and distributed strategy for patrolling missions by robotic swarms, including a fixed base station. One of the essential requirements for autonomous robotic swarms is predictability from human operators. As a clue to satisfy this requirement in patrolling missions, the strategy employs hierarchized algorithms to maintain continuous connectivity to the base station by (i)global patrol and (ii)local patrol. Each robot selects the location to patrol by one of the two algorithms, according to the robot’s role. The paper also introduces a performance metric for the base station’s situational awareness, which may indicate the swarm behaviors’ predictability. The simulation study tested the proposed strategy and compared it to an existing strategy. The proposed strategy demonstrated successful patrol behavior with continuous connectivity to the base station. Though the existing strategy performed better in some aspects, the proposed strategy effectively covered the whole mission area and provided the base station with higher situational awareness.

著者

Kazuho Kobayashi Takehiro Higuchi Seiya Ueno

出版者

Springer

雑誌

Artificial Life and Robotics (ISSN:16147456)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.27, no.4, pp.876-884, 2022-09-30

被引用文献数

1

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Swarm robotics requires a practical scheme to maintain operator supervision for the acceptability of systems' autonomy by humans. For this purpose, this paper proposes a distributed algorithm for continuous connectivity between robots and a base station to maintain the controllability and transparency of the swarm. This algorithm forms network topology among the swarm members and deploys repeaters to maintain the connection to the base station by a role switching scheme. Preliminary simulations have shown that the revised acute angle test reduced the cost of the network formation with the Gabriel graph topology. Through the simulated patrol missions, the proposed algorithm successfully maintained the continuous connectivity between the base station and the swarm members without significant inequality in the computational cost among swarm members. Furthermore, as the number of robots increases, the computational cost per robot does not increase significantly. These results indicate the distributed nature and scalability of the proposed algorithms.