Task allocation for robots using inspiration from hormones

Abstract

This article describes a robotic system which uses evolution to continuously adapt a group of heterogeneous robots to their current environment while assigning tasks to these robots using an endocrine-based system. The tasks are allocated dependent on the robots’ current ability to perform the task and whether the task is being done by another robot. A series of experiments is presented taking the work from an evolutionary training phase, through simulation trials, to experiments on real robots. The real robot trials show task swapping dependent on the robots’ ability to perform each task.