Ant-Inspired Strategies For Multi-Robot Collaborative Transportation- An Ockham’s Razor

摘要

Ants demonstrate effective team effort and heavy lift capability during collaborative transportation (CT) of their food. In such a biological system, each ant acts independently and knows how to comply with it’s team. The work presented in this paper attempts to mimic simple ant strategies, with minimal assumptions (thus termed as an Ockham’s razor) for a multi-robot CT system. Four control schemes, inspired from ants and incorporating different ant behaviors, are presented in this paper. Particularly, this paper focuses on the ant-inspired control schemes that account for force coordination in addition to switching of the roles of robots (leader or follower). Force coordination is a relevant aspect of CT and has not been adequately treated in CT literature, especially that of ants. While methods 1 and 2 presented in this paper incorporate ant behaviors representing positional navigation and role-switching, methods 3 and 4 incorporate additional novel aspect of force coordination behavior among the ants. A fuzzy logic force feedback controller is utilised in these methods, which provides the necessary human/ant like force coordination between robots. Detailed analysis of these schemes have been performed using extensive numerical simulations.