by Eliseo Ferrante, Manuele Brambilla, Mauro Birattari and Marco Dorigo
March 2010
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This page contains all supplementary information that, for the sake of conciseness, was not included in the paper. Table of Contents |
In this paper, we present a novel methodology to perform collective transport in the presence of obstacles. Three robots are physically connected to an object to be transported from a start to a goal location.
The task poses a new challenge: members of the group have a heterogeneous perception of the environment, due to the fact that both goal direction and the obstacles might be perceived only by a subset of the group. Hence, the task requires appropriate negotiation of the direction among the members of the group. We developed a novel negotiation strategy in order to tackle this challenge.
We perform experiments in simulation. In the experiments, we analyze efficiency in an environment with only one obstacle, and robustness in an environment with several obstacles.
Keywords: Swarm Intelligence, Swarm Robotics, Collective Transport, Obstacle Avoidance
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