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of land, support in rescue operations and intervention in environment hostile or
contaminated and surveillance operations, etc. [2],[3].
In general, a multi-robot system consists of a set of robots that, in the same
environment, interact with each other to achieve a common goal [4], thus trying
to improve the effectiveness, eciency, performance and robustness of a robotic
system. These systems provide greater flexibility in performing tasks and possible
fault tolerance. To achieve that several robots coordinate with each other to
perform a specific mission is not a trivial task, because, they must be designed
to operate in dynamic environments in which we must also take into account
the classical problems of autonomous robotics (e.g. uncertainty and unforeseen
changes always present), new diculties arising from the influence of the team
robots on the environment and the task goal. For this reason, it is an issue that
has aroused much interest to many researchers, both in the field of robotics
and biology, in this regard; it is noteworthy that some biological approaches
have served as inspiration for the design of coordination models in multi-robot
systems.
For over many years, communities or colonies of social insects have been deeply
studied by some researchers [5], [6], as they provide fascinating examples of
functional collective behavior. From a biological standpoint, it has attracted
much interest specifically for the way they carry out the division of labor, the
fact that members of a colony specialize in certain roles. In this way, it takes
place at the societal level, given a number of specific tasks, a division of labor
and based on this assignment, individuals will acquire specific skills through
practice. A colony of insects functions as an integrated unit that is capable of
processing large amounts of information in a distributed manner. In the sequel
we describe the so-called response threshold model for its particular interest as
a theoretical model of how some social insects implement their social division of
labor.
2 Related Work
The coordination among robots is an important aspect of research on multi-
robot systems; there are usually two kinds of strategy for the coordination of
multi-robots, which are centralized and distributed strategies. Currently, there
are several studies that focus mainly on the coordination of a set of robots using
different techniques, in order to solve a specific problem. Then, it described some
potential trends of research articles related with the coordination of multi-agent
systems, swarm robots and multi-robot systems.
A. Multi-agent systems
Price and Tino suggest a number of strategies to address problems of task al-
location in multi-agent systems, based on the principle of self-organization of
social insects through the mathematical model developed by Bonabeau. They
make a comparison of decentralized algorithms (FIFO and Greedy) to measure
and evaluate the effectiveness of each strategy to process the mail and at the
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