Research in swarm robotics focuses mostly on how robots interact and cooperate to perform tasks, rather than on the details of task execution. As a consequence, researchers often consider abstract tasks in their experimental work. For example, foraging is often studied without physically handling objects: the retrieval of an object from a source to a destination is abstracted into a trip between the two locations---no object is physically transported. Despite being commonly used, so far task abstraction has only been implemented in an ad hoc fashion.<p><p>In this dissertation, I propose a collection of tools for flexible and reproducible task abstraction. At the core of this collection is a physical device that serves as an abstraction of a single-robot task to be performed by an e-puck robot. I call this device the TAM, an acronym for "task abstraction module". A complex multi-robot task can be abstracted using a group of TAMs by first modeling the task as the set of its constituent single-robot subtasks and then representing each subtask with a TAM. I propose a novel approach to modeling complex tasks and a framework for controlling a group of TAMs such that the behavior of the group implements the model of the complex task.<p><p>The combination of the TAM, the modeling approach, and the control framework forms a collection of tools for conducting research in swarm robotics. These tools enable research on cooperative behaviors and complex tasks with simple, cost-effective robots such as the e-puck - research that would be difficult and costly to conduct using specialized robots or ad hoc solutions to task abstraction. I present proof-of-concept experiments and several studies that use the TAM for task abstraction in order to illustrate the variety of tasks that can be studied with the proposed tools.<p> / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ulb.ac.be/oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209123 |
| Date | 17 December 2014 |
| Creators | Brutschy, Arne |
| Contributors | Dorigo, Marco, Robert, Frédéric, Gutiérrez, Álvaro, Gross, Roderich, Bersini, Hugues, Birattari, Mauro |
| Publisher | Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Université libre de Bruxelles, Ecole polytechnique de Bruxelles – Informatique, Bruxelles |
| Source Sets | Université libre de Bruxelles |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, info:ulb-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, info:ulb-repo/semantics/openurl/vlink-dissertation |
| Format | 1 v. (220 p.), 2 full-text file(s): application/pdf | application/pdf |
| Rights | 2 full-text file(s): info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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