RFID digital pheromones for generating stigmergic behaviour to autonomous mobile robots

摘要

During the past years, the price of RFID tags have constantly dropped, while their technical performances increased. Along with the constant interest of the researchers for the problems of swarm intelligence, this opens a wide area of applications based on the use of RFID tags as storage media for digital pheromones, aimed to mediate the communication between various agents. A simple method to define digital pheromones as data structures and to simulate the evaporation process of the natural pheromones is described. This paper describes an experiment where RFID tags storing digital pheromones, deployed in an indoor environment, are used to define a dynamic path to be followed by autonomous mobile robots. The robots sense the pheoromones in the environment by means of a dual antenna, just like ants do, and a fuzzy controller governs the left-right movement thereof. The experimental results prove that the idea of using digital pheromones to control the movement of autonomous mobile robots is entirely feasible, even with very simple robots. This opens new possibilities to improve robot to robot and human to robot interaction. The idea of enabling mobile robots with new senses, and thus going beyond the antropomorphic paradigm in robot control, seems to be productive.