Transferability in the Automatic Off-Line Design of Robot Swarms: From Sim-to-Real to Embodiment and Design-Method Transfer Across Different Platforms

Abstract

Automatic off-line design is an attractive approach to implementing robot swarms. In this approach, a designer specifies a mission to be accomplished by the swarm, and an optimization process generates suitable control software for the individual robots through computer-based simulations. Most relevant literature has focused on effectively transferring control software from simulation to physical robots. Here, we investigate <list list-type="ordered" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><list-item><label>1)</label> whether the design methods that generate control software are transferable across robot platforms and </list-item> <list-item><label>2)</label> whether control software generated via such methods is itself transferable. </list-item> </list> We experiment with two ground mobile platforms with equivalent functional capabilities. Our measure of transferability is based on the performance drop observed when control software and/or design methods are ported from one platform to another. Results indicate that, while the control software generated via automatic design is possibly transferable, better performance can be achieved when a transferable method is directly applied to the new platform.