AutoMoDe: A novel approach to the automatic design of control software for robot swarms

We introduce AutoMoDe: a novel approach to the automatic design of control software for robot swarms. The core idea in AutoMoDe recalls the approach commonly adopted in machine learning for dealing with the bias-variance tradedoff: to obtain suitably general solutions with low variance, an appropriate design bias is injected. AutoMoDe produces robot control software by selecting, instantiating, and combining preexisting parametric modules-the injected bias. The resulting control software is a probabilistic finite state machine in which the topology, the transition rules and the values of the parameters are obtained automatically via an optimization process that maximizes a task-specific objective function. As a proof of concept, we define AutoMoDe-Vanilla, which is a specialization of AutoMoDe for the e-puck robot. We use AutoMoDe-Vanilla to design the robot control software for two different tasks: aggregation and foraging. The results show that the control software produced by AutoMoDe-Vanilla (i) yields good results, (ii) appears to be robust to the so called reality gap, and (iii) is naturally human-readable.

Tipo Pubblicazione: 
Articolo
Author or Creator: 
Francesca, Gianpiero
Brambilla, Manuele
Brutschy, Arne
Trianni, Vito
Birattari, Mauro
Publisher: 
Springer Science + Business Media Inc., Seacaucus, NJ , Stati Uniti d'America
Source: 
Swarm intelligence 8 (2014): 89–112. doi:10.1007/s11721-014-0092-4
info:cnr-pdr/source/autori:Francesca, Gianpiero; Brambilla, Manuele; Brutschy, Arne; Trianni, Vito; Birattari, Mauro/titolo:AutoMoDe: A novel approach to the automatic design of control software for robot swarms/doi:10.1007/s11721-014-0092-4/rivista:Swarm
Date: 
2014
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/306145
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11721-014-0092-4
info:doi:10.1007/s11721-014-0092-4
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
Ritratto di Vito Trianni
Real name: