Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Jul 2019)

Automatic Off-Line Design of Robot Swarms: A Manifesto

  • Mauro Birattari,
  • Antoine Ligot,
  • Darko Bozhinoski,
  • Manuele Brambilla,
  • Gianpiero Francesca,
  • Lorenzo Garattoni,
  • David Garzón Ramos,
  • Ken Hasselmann,
  • Miquel Kegeleirs,
  • Jonas Kuckling,
  • Federico Pagnozzi,
  • Andrea Roli,
  • Muhammad Salman,
  • Thomas Stützle

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2019.00059
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6

Abstract

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Designing collective behaviors for robot swarms is a difficult endeavor due to their fully distributed, highly redundant, and ever-changing nature. To overcome the challenge, a few approaches have been proposed, which can be classified as manual, semi-automatic, or automatic design. This paper is intended to be the manifesto of the automatic off-line design for robot swarms. We define the off-line design problem and illustrate it via a possible practical realization, highlight the core research questions, raise a number of issues regarding the existing literature that is relevant to the automatic off-line design, and provide guidelines that we deem necessary for a healthy development of the domain and for ensuring its relevance to potential real-world applications.

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