Abstract
Running hardware-based experiments in multi-robot construction is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Furthermore, it is difficult to disseminate the results from hardware-based experiments in a way that other researchers can build upon. In this paper, we present a number of plug-ins for a multi-robot simulator that we have developed to enable a high-fidelity simulation of the multi-robot construction systems typically found in laboratory settings. We validate these plug-ins qualitatively by repeating a hardware-based experiment in simulation where a single robot assembles a staircase from blocks [1]. We then show how we can use the plug-ins to scale up the complexity of the construction scenario and demonstrate multi-robot construction in simulation. To enable other researchers to replicate our experiments and to promote collaboration, we have made our plug-ins open source.
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Notes
- 1.
Users of ARGoS – http://www.argos-sim.info/users.php.
- 2.
Bullet Physics – http://bulletphysics.org/.
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Acknowledgments
Michael Allwright was supported by the Australian Government through the Endeavour Scholarships and Fellowships Program. Navneet Bhalla was partially supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Marco Dorigo acknowledges support from the Belgian F.R.S.-FNRS, of which he is a Research Director. The work presented in this paper was partially supported by the FLAG-ERA project RoboCom++ and by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 681872). We would like to thank Haitham El-faham and Weixu Zhu for their help with implementing and testing the magnetism code in the three-dimensional dynamics plug-in.
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Allwright, M., Bhalla, N., Pinciroli, C., Dorigo, M. (2018). Simulating Multi-robot Construction in ARGoS. In: Dorigo, M., Birattari, M., Blum, C., Christensen, A., Reina, A., Trianni, V. (eds) Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11172. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00533-7_15
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