Collective behaviors of autonomous robots in complex environment
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Complex adaptive systems (MPCAS), MSc
Publicerad
2021
Författare
Suphona, Thomas
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
Collective behaviors or collective motion is a common phenomena in nature where
multiple organisms in a system undergo ordered movements. This can be observed in
different scales, from the microscale with bacteria swarming to the macro scale with
for example flocks of birds, schools of fish and even human crowds and car traffic.
All these systems are made up by self-propelling agents who are able to take up
energy from their environment and converting it to directed motion. Because of this
property of self-propulsion, their dynamics cannot be explained using conventional
methods. Although significant efforts have been made in trying to explain collective
behaviors from different perspective, using simulation tools and study systems in
different scales, the subject is not as widely studied from the macroscale, especially
with artificially made systems. In this thesis, a macroscale system was designed with
the purpose of providing conditions for collective behaviors to emerge and study how
the behaviors changes depending on the surrounding conditions. Battery powered
robots were used as self-propelling agents and they were placed in a confined space
filled with obstacles. It was shown that when the number of robots and obstacles
inside the system is large, the robots movements were significantly restricted. The
weight of the obstacles do also affect the average motions of the robots where heavier
obstacles hinder the robots by creating blockage leading to the robots having lower
average velocity. At certain configurations of the parameters, the robots showed
collective behaviors where they for example form channels between the obstacles,
making ”roads” for other robots to reuse, or helping each other to move by pushing
away chunks of obstacles or pushing onto each other. Even though these robots are
simple agents, they have managed to manifest cooperative actions towards other
agents.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
collective behaviors , complex environment , flocks , swarm