Design of a Multi-Robot System Using Mobile Agents with Ant Colony Clustering

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for controlling mobile multiple robots connected by communication networks. This framework provides novel methods to control coordinated systems using mobile agents. Instead of physical movement of multiple robots, mobile software agents can migrate from one robot to another so that they can minimize energy consumption in aggregation. In some applications, it is desirable that multiple robots draw themselves together automatically. In order to avoid excessive energy consumption, we employ mobile software agents to locate robots scattered in a field, and make them autonomously determine their moving behaviors by using a clustering algorithm based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). ACO is the swarm intelligence-based method that exploits artificial stigmergy for the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. Preliminary experiments have provided a favorable result. In this paper, we focus on the implementation of the controlling mechanism of the multi-robot system using the mobile agents.