Design of Control Policies for Spatially Inhomogeneous Robot Swarms with Application to Commercial Pollination
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Design of Control Policies for Spatially Inhomogeneous Robot Swarms with Application to Commercial Pollination
| Title: | Design of Control Policies for Spatially Inhomogeneous Robot Swarms with Application to Commercial Pollination |
| Author: |
Berman, Spring; Kumar, Vijay; Nagpal, Radhika
Note: Order does not necessarily reflect citation order of authors. |
| Citation: | Berman, Spring, Vijay Kumar and Radhika Nagpal. 2011. Design of control policies for spatially inhomogeneous robot swarms with application to commercial pollination. In Proceedings of 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (IRCA 2011): May 9-13, Shanghai, China, 378-385. New York: IEEE Press Books. |
| Full Text & Related Files: |
ICRA11_Final.pdf (598.5Kb; PDF) 
|
| Abstract: | We present an approach to designing scalable, decentralized control policies that produce a desired collective behavior in a spatially inhomogeneous robotic swarm that emulates a system of chemically reacting molecules. Our approach is based on abstracting the swarm to an advectiondiffusion-reaction partial differential equation model, which we solve numerically using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), a meshfree technique that is suitable for advectiondominated systems. The parameters of the macroscopic model are mapped onto the deterministic and random components of individual robot motion and the probabilities that determine stochastic robot task transitions. For very large swarms that are prohibitively expensive to simulate, the macroscopic model, which is independent of the population size, is a useful tool for synthesizing robot control policies with guarantees on performance in a top-down fashion. We illustrate our methodology by formulating a model of rabbiteye blueberry pollination by a swarm of robotic bees and using the macroscopic model to select control policies for efficient pollination. |
| Published Version: | doi:10.1109/ICRA.2011.5980440 |
| Terms of Use: | This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#OAP |
| Citable link to this page: | http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:8954815 |
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Peer reviewed scholarly articles from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University
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