Analyzing macroscopic behavior in a swarm robotic system based on clustering

Abstract

Swarm robotics is a new research field of multi-robot systems which generally consist of many homogeneous autonomous robots without any type of global controllers. Since a robotic swarm is controlled by an emergent way of many interactions with the other robots or an environment, such as a result of self-organization, robot learning or artificial evolution, no method has been known to grasp the macroscopic behavior in a practical sense, according to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, based on this situation, a novel method for analyzing the macroscopic behavior inspired by a technique in the field of complex networks is proposed. This method is demonstrated on a robotic swarm behavior for the cooperative transport problem by drawing the dendrogram and extracting the community structure.