Title
Cooperative Transportation Using Pheromone Agents.
Abstract
This paper presents an algorithm for cooperatively transporting objects by multiple robots without any initial knowledge. The robots are connected by communication networks, and the controlling algorithm is based on the pheromone communication of social insects such as ants. Unlike traditional pheromone based cooperative transportation, we have implemented the pheromone as mobile software agents that control the mobile robots corresponding to the ants. The pheromone agent has the vector value pointing to its birth location inside, which is used to guide a robot to the birth location. Since the pheromone agent can diffuse with migrations between robots as the same manner as physical pheromone, it can attract other robots scattering in a work field to the birth location. Once the robot finds an object, it briefly pushes the object, measuring the degree of the inclination of the object. The robot generates a pheromone agent with the vector value to pushing point suitable for suppressing the inclination of the object. The process of the pushes and generations of pheromone agents enables the efficient transportation of the object. We have implemented a simulator that follows our algorithm, and conducted experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1007/978-3-319-25210-0_4
AGENTS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, ICAART 2014
Keywords
Field
DocType
Mobile agent,Multiple robots,Ant colony optimization,Swarm intelligence
Ant colony optimization algorithms,Telecommunications network,Computer science,Ant robotics,Mobile agent,Swarm intelligence,Software agent,Real-time computing,Artificial intelligence,Robot,Machine learning,Mobile robot
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
8946
0302-9743
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ryo Takahashi1276.89
Munehiro Takimoto29221.45
Yasushi Kambayashi312429.76