Artificial immune network-based cooperative control in collective autonomous mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method of cooperative control based on immune system in distributed autonomous robotic system (DARS). Immune system is living body's self-protection and self-maintenance system. Thus these features can be applied to decision making of optimal swarm behavior in dynamically changing environment. For the purpose of applying the immune system to DARS, a robot is regarded as a B lymphocyte (B cell), each environmental condition as an antigen and a behavior strategy as an antibody respectively. The executing process of proposed method is as follows: when the environmental condition changes, a robot selects an appropriate behavior strategy, and its behavior strategy is stimulated and suppressed by other robot using communication. Finally, such stimulated strategy is adopted as a swarm behavior strategy. This control scheme is based on clonal selection and idiotopic network hypothesis, and it is used for decision making of an optimal swarm strategy.