Indirect cooperation between mobile robots through an active environment

Abstract

Abstract. In this work we study indirect robots ’ perception and co-operation by enabling a way of communication through the environ-ment. It consists in paving the floor with communicating tiles, each one beeing connected to its neighbors and implementing an autonomous process. This regular network constitutes a grid world in which robots can read and write information. So bio-inspired models using marking of the environment, such as digital pheromones, can be implemented with real robots. We present experimental results showing the interest of the approach in multi-robot problems, by using message diffusion and pheromone evaporation processes. Key words: digital pheromones, autonomous and collective robots, en-vironment based models 1