A distributed swarm intelligence based algorithm for a cooperative multi-robot construction task

Abstract

A collective construction task require a multi-robot system to search for randomly distributed building blocks and push those blocks to some predefined locations. To address this problem, a bio-inspired swarm intelligence based algorithm is proposed for a distributed multi-robot system to combine explorative searching and dynamic task allocation together for collective construction. Basically, a virtual pheromone trail based method is proposed as the message passing mechanism among the robots, where robots make distributed movement decisions through local interactions. Since blocks may need multiple robots to work together, dynamic task allocation among robots is necessary. A modified Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method is proposed to balance the exploration and exploitation, which helps to allocate reasonable robots to different target blocks. The simulation results in multi-robot construction task demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method.