%0 Generic
%A Carrillo, Maria
%A Gallardo, Ian
%A Del Ser, Javier
%A Osaba, Eneko
%A Sanchez-Cubillo, Javier
%A Bilbao, Miren Nekane
%A Gálvez, Akemi
%A Iglesias, Andrés
%T A bio-inspired approach for collaborative exploration with mobile battery recharging in swarm robotics
%J Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
%D 2018
%@ 0302-9743
%U https://hdl.handle.net/11556/2466
%X Swarm Robotics are widely conceived as the development of new computationally efficient tools and techniques aimed at easing and enhancing the coordination of multiple robots towards collaboratively accomplishing a certain mission or task. Among the different criteria under which the performance of Swarm Robotics can be gauged, energy efficiency and battery lifetime have played a major role in the literature. However, technological advances favoring power transfer among robots have unleashed new paradigms related to the optimization of the battery consumption considering it as a resource shared by the entire swarm. This work focuses on this context by elaborating on a routing problem for collaborative exploration in Swarm Robotics, where a subset of robots is equipped with battery recharging functionalities. Formulated as a bi-objective optimization problem, the quality of routes is measured in terms of the Pareto trade-off between the predicted area explored by robots and the risk of battery outage in the swarm. To efficiently balance these conflicting two objectives, a bio-inspired evolutionary solver is adopted and put to practice over a realistic experimental setup implemented in the VREP simulation framework. Obtained results elucidate the practicability of the proposed scheme, and suggest future research leveraging power transfer capabilities over the swarm.
%~