A fully decentralized approach for incremental perception

Abstract

The area of Swarm Robotics is still in its infancy. Key concepts at the basic level have to be invented and developed in order to achieve the future goal of building large scale physical and controllable autonomous robotic swarms. In this paper we extend the concept of Incremental Perception in swarm robotics into the domain of complete decentralization. Our work is aimed at micro-robotic swarms where the hardware resources available for the robots will be limited. Hence a decentralized system becomes inevitable because it does not require intra-dependence of robot agents, their monitoring system or a communication mechanism for the agents; absence of all these factors results in reduced hardware requirements for the agents. We focus on the co-operative behavior of robots rather than relying on their individual capabilities. We also propose the parameters and functions that are required for a completely decentralized system and show that such a system can be successfully modeled and analyzed.