Agent-Based Emulation for Deploying Robot Swarm Behaviors

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Vega, Ricardo, Zhu, Kevin, Mattson, Connor, Brown, Daniel S., Nowzari, Cameron
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Vega, Ricardo
Zhu, Kevin
Mattson, Connor
Brown, Daniel S.
Nowzari, Cameron
author_facet Vega, Ricardo
Zhu, Kevin
Mattson, Connor
Brown, Daniel S.
Nowzari, Cameron
contents Despite significant research, robotic swarms have yet to be useful in solving real-world problems, largely due to the difficulty of creating and controlling swarming behaviors in multi-agent systems. Traditional top-down approaches in which a desired emergent behavior is produced often require complex, resource-heavy robots, limiting their practicality. This paper introduces a bottom-up approach by employing an Embodied Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation approach, emphasizing the use of simple robots and identifying conditions that naturally lead to self-organized collective behaviors. Using the Reality-to-Simulation-to-Reality for Swarms (RSRS) process, we tightly integrate real-world experiments with simulations to reproduce known swarm behaviors as well as discovering a novel emergent behavior without aiming to eliminate or even reduce the sim2real gap. This paper presents the development of an Agent-Based Embodiment and Emulation process that balances the importance of running physical swarming experiments and the prohibitively time-consuming process of even setting up and running a single experiment with 20+ robots by leveraging low-fidelity lightweight simulations to enable hypothesis-formation to guide physical experiments. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods by emulating two known behaviors from the literature and show a third behavior `discovered' by accident.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_16444
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Agent-Based Emulation for Deploying Robot Swarm Behaviors
Vega, Ricardo
Zhu, Kevin
Mattson, Connor
Brown, Daniel S.
Nowzari, Cameron
Robotics
Systems and Control
Despite significant research, robotic swarms have yet to be useful in solving real-world problems, largely due to the difficulty of creating and controlling swarming behaviors in multi-agent systems. Traditional top-down approaches in which a desired emergent behavior is produced often require complex, resource-heavy robots, limiting their practicality. This paper introduces a bottom-up approach by employing an Embodied Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation approach, emphasizing the use of simple robots and identifying conditions that naturally lead to self-organized collective behaviors. Using the Reality-to-Simulation-to-Reality for Swarms (RSRS) process, we tightly integrate real-world experiments with simulations to reproduce known swarm behaviors as well as discovering a novel emergent behavior without aiming to eliminate or even reduce the sim2real gap. This paper presents the development of an Agent-Based Embodiment and Emulation process that balances the importance of running physical swarming experiments and the prohibitively time-consuming process of even setting up and running a single experiment with 20+ robots by leveraging low-fidelity lightweight simulations to enable hypothesis-formation to guide physical experiments. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods by emulating two known behaviors from the literature and show a third behavior `discovered' by accident.
title Agent-Based Emulation for Deploying Robot Swarm Behaviors
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16444