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Volume 7 Issue 3
Apr.  2020

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

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Megan Emmons, Anthony A. Maciejewski, Charles Anderson and Edwin K. P. Chong, "Classifying Environmental Features From Local Observations of Emergent Swarm Behavior," IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 674-682, May 2020. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003129
Citation: Megan Emmons, Anthony A. Maciejewski, Charles Anderson and Edwin K. P. Chong, "Classifying Environmental Features From Local Observations of Emergent Swarm Behavior," IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 674-682, May 2020. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003129

Classifying Environmental Features From Local Observations of Emergent Swarm Behavior

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003129
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  • Robots in a swarm are programmed with individual behaviors but then interactions with the environment and other robots produce more complex, emergent swarm behaviors. One discriminating feature of the emergent behavior is the local distribution of robots in any given region. In this work, we show how local observations of the robot distribution can be correlated to the environment being explored and hence the location of openings or obstructions can be inferred. The correlation is achieved here with a simple, single-layer neural network that generates physically intuitive weights and provides a degree of robustness by allowing for variation in the environment and number of robots in the swarm. The robots are simulated assuming random motion with no communication, a minimalist model in robot sophistication, to explore the viability of cooperative sensing. We culminate our work with a demonstration of how the local distribution of robots in an unknown, office-like environment can be used to locate unobstructed exits.

     

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    Highlights

    • Demonstrate the locally observed distribution of a robot swarm can be correlated to the location of openings in office-like environments
      a) Simulated robots are extremely simple - they are not equipped with any communication abilities and only use random motion to explore the environment
      b) Correlation between locally observed robot density and global environmental features can be achieved with a simple, single-layer neural network
      c) Only information required to predict environment class is a local observation of the robot density.
    • Can use the correlation to predict the location of exits in an office-like environment without requiring any communication or path-planning algorithms.
    • Approach is extremely robust: environments can still be classified at better than random accuracy following a 90% loss in the number of robots functioning
      a) Extending the classification process, after a 90% decrease in the number of robots, an office worker can still observe the number of robots around them and move away from the least likely exit location to further increase the classification accuracy of the system.

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