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Motion-based communication for robotic swarms in exploration missions

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Abstract

Many people are fascinated by biological swarms, but understanding the behavior and inherent task objectives of a bird flock or ant colony requires training. Whereas several swarm intelligence works focus on mimicking natural swarm behaviors, we argue that this may not be the most intuitive approach to facilitate communication with the operators. Instead, we focus on the legibility of swarm expressive motions to communicate mission-specific messages to the operator. To do so, we leverage swarm intelligence algorithms on chain formation for resilient exploration and mapping combined with acyclic graph formation (AGF) into a novel swarm-oriented programming strategy. We then explore how expressive motions of robot swarms could be designed and test the legibility of nine different expressive motions in an online user study with 98 participants. We found several differences between the motions in communicating messages to the users. These findings represent a promising starting point for the design of legible expressive motions for implementation in decentralized robot swarms.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec Nature et technologies (FRQNT), École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) and by the University of Paris Lumières Innovative Project Grant UPL-PEERM 232512-2021.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Supérieure, 1100 Notre-Dame W, Montreal, QC, 100190, Canada

    Corentin Boucher & David St-Onge

  2. CHArt-LUTIN Laboratory RNSR 200515259, Department of Psychology, Université Paris 8, Rue de la Liberté, Paris, 93526, Saint Denis, France

    Rebecca Stower & Elisabetta Zibetti

  3. Department of Computer and Software Engineering, Polytechnique de Montréal, 1000 Chemin Polytechnique, Montreal, QC, 100190, Canada

    Vivek Shankar Varadharajan

  4. Costech laboratory EA2223, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, Rue du Dr Schweitzer, 60200, Compiègne, France

    Florent Levillain

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  1. Corentin Boucher
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  2. Rebecca Stower
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  3. Vivek Shankar Varadharajan
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  4. Elisabetta Zibetti
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  5. Florent Levillain
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  6. David St-Onge
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Correspondence to Corentin Boucher.

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Boucher, C., Stower, R., Varadharajan, V.S. et al. Motion-based communication for robotic swarms in exploration missions. Auton Robot 47, 833–847 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-022-10079-0

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