A Space- and Time-Continuous Model of Self-Organizing Robot Swarms for Design Support

— Designing and implementing artificial self-organizing systems is a challenging task since they typically behave nonintuitive and no theoretical foundations exist. Predicting a system of many components with a huge amount of interactions is beyond human skills. The currently common use of simulations for design support is not satisfying, as it is time-consuming and the results are most likely suboptimal. In this work, we present the derivation of an analytical, time-, and space-continuous model for a swarm of autonomous robots based on the Fokker-Planck equation. While the motion model is in most parts physically motivated, the communication model is based on a heuristic approach. A showcase application to a recently proposed scenario of collective perception in a huge swarm of robots with very limited abilities is given and the simulation results are compared to the model. Despite the high abstraction, the prediction discrepancies are small and the parameters can be mapped one-to-...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SASO
• Authors: Heiko Hamann, Heinz Wörn
• Keywords: Artificial Self-organizing Systems, Model, SASO 2007, Self-Organizing Systems, Space-continuous Model