Performance evaluation of a multi-robot search & retrieval system: Experiences with MinDART

Paul E. Rybski; Amy Larson; Harini Veeraraghavan; Monica Anderson; Maria Gini

doi:10.1007/s10846-008-9222-9

Performance evaluation of a multi-robot search & retrieval system: Experiences with MinDART

Paul E. Rybski, Amy Larson, Harini Veeraraghavan, Monica Anderson, Maria Gini

Computer Science and Engineering

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Swarm techniques, where many simple robots are used instead of complex ones for performing a task, promise to reduce the cost of developing robot teams for many application domains. The challenge lies in selecting an appropriate control strategy for the individual units. This work explores the effect of control strategies of varying complexity and environmental factors on the performance of a team of robots at a foraging task when using physical robots (the Minnesota Distributed Autonomous Robotic Team). Specifically we study the effect of localization and of simple indirect communication techniques on task completion time using two sets of foraging experiments. We also present results for task performance with varying team sizes and target distributions. As indicated by the results, control strategies with increasing complexity reduce the variance in the performance, but do not always reduce the time to complete the task.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	363-387
Number of pages	25
Journal	Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems: Theory and Applications
Volume	52
Issue number	3-4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-008-9222-9
State	Published - Aug 2008

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Acknowledgments This work was supported in part by the Louise T. Dosdall Fellowship to Amy Larson, and by NSF under grants EIA-0224363 and EIA-0324864. Our thanks to Daniel Boley for his insights into the localization algorithm and in computing a closed-form solution. We would like to thank Heather Metcalf and Devon Skyllingstad for their help in constructing the electronics for the robot’s beacons; Anne Schoolcraft, Michael Lindahl, and Sarah Osentoski for their help in running experiments, constructing targets and helping to implement the localization algorithm; and Joseph Djugash, Ashutosh Jaiswal, Esra Kadioglu, Elaine B. Rybski, Sirintorn Clay, Adam Thorne, David Littau, and Lorry Strother for their help in the construction of the robots and in data collection.

Keywords

MinDART
Multi-robot systems
Performance evaluation
Search and retrieval

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Performance evaluation of a multi-robot search & retrieval system: Experiences with MinDART

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Keywords

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