Behavioral and distributed architecture of control for minimalist mobile robots

Abstract

This paper describes a specific behavioral and reactive architecture of control applied to complex and cooperative tasks. The coordination between elementary behaviors (layers of skills) is insured using both hierarchical and fusion action mechanisms. Indeed, competitive and cooperative mechanisms are gathered giving thus an Hybrid and Hierarchical Action Selection Process Hybrid-HASP in order to perform complex box-pushing tasks by a set of minimalist mobile robots. Specific low-level behaviors, called altruistic behaviors reproducing the simple interaction (attraction/repulsion) of individuals constituting societies of insects are integrated into the architecture of control in order to improve the efficiency of robots coordination. The analysis of a great number of simulations allows us to have convincing statistical results which show among others, the existence of an optimal number of robots to achieve the cooperative task and underline the importance of implicit communications induced by the altruistic behaviors.