IRIDIA - Supplementary Information (ISSN: 2684-2041)

Supplementary material for the paper:

Modular automatic design of collective behaviors for robots endowed with local communication capabilities

Ken Hasselmann and Mauro Birattari (April 2020)


Table of Contents
  1. Abstract
  2. Study A
    1. Aggregation
    2. Decision
    3. Stop
  3. Study B
    1. Beacon Aggregation
    2. Beacon Decision
    3. Beacon Stop
  4. Further analysis
    1. Beacon Aggregation
    2. Beacon Stop
    3. Noise models

Abstract

We study the automatic design of communication through two studies. We first introduce Gianduja, an automatic design method that generates collective behaviors for robot swarms in which individuals can locally exchange a message whose semantics is not a priori fixed. It is the automatic design process that, on a per-mission basis, defines the conditions under which the message is sent and the effect that it has on the receiving peers. Then, we extend Gianduja to Gianduja2 and Gianduja3, which target robots that can exchange multiple distinct messages. Also in this case, the semantics of the messages is automatically defined on a per-mission basis by the design process. Gianduja and its variants are based on Chocolate, which does not provide any support for local communication. In the paper, we compare Gianduja and its variants with a standard neuro-evolutionary approach. We consider a total of six different swarm robotics missions. We present results based on simulation and tests performed with 20 e-puck robots. Results show that, for all considered missions, Gianduja and its variants are able to associate a meaningful semantics to messages.

Code is available on GitHub