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AutoMoDe-Chocolate: automatic design of control software for robot swarms

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Abstract

We present two empirical studies on the design of control software for robot swarms. In Study A, Vanilla and EvoStick, two previously published automatic design methods, are compared with human designers. The comparison is performed on five swarm robotics tasks that are different from those on which Vanilla and EvoStick have been previously tested. The results show that, under the experimental conditions considered, Vanilla performs better than EvoStick, but it is not able to outperform human designers. The results indicate that Vanilla ’s weak element is the optimization algorithm employed to search the space of candidate designs. To improve over Vanilla and with the final goal of obtaining an automatic design method that performs better than human designers, we introduce Chocolate, which differs from Vanilla only in the fact that it adopts a more powerful optimization algorithm. In Study B, we perform an assessment of Chocolate. The results show that, under the experimental conditions considered, Chocolate outperforms both Vanilla and the human designers. Chocolate is the first automatic design method for robot swarms that, at least under specific experimental conditions, is shown to outperform a human designer.

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Notes

  1. The range-and-bearing board also allows the e-pucks to exchange messages. However, this functionality is not included in \(\mathrm {RM}1\).

  2. https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/.

  3. http://valgrind.org/.

  4. With the goal of establishing accountability and credit, the five experts are included among the authors of this paper.

  5. We think that PhD candidates are ideal subjects for this study. Indeed, it is our understanding that a large share of the robot swarms described in the domain literature have been programmed by PhD candidates. See Francesca et al. (2014a) for data extracted from the publication record of our research laboratory.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Maria Zampetti and Maxime Bussios for their help with the robots, and Marco Chiarandini for his implementation of the Friedman test. This research was partially funded by the ERC Advanced Grant “E-SWARM” (Grant Agreement No. 246939). It was also partially supported by the COMEX project within the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Program of the Belgian Science Policy Office. Vito Trianni acknowledges support from the Italian CNR. Arne Brutschy, Franco Mascia, and Mauro Birattari acknowledge support from the Belgian F.R.S.–FNRS. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Touraj Soleymani

    Present address: ITR, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany

  2. Carlo Pinciroli

    Present address: MIST, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIDIA, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Gianpiero Francesca, Manuele Brambilla, Arne Brutschy, Lorenzo Garattoni, Roman Miletitch, Gaëtan Podevijn, Andreagiovanni Reina, Touraj Soleymani, Mattia Salvaro, Carlo Pinciroli, Franco Mascia & Mauro Birattari

  2. Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Mattia Salvaro

  3. ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy

    Vito Trianni

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  1. Gianpiero Francesca
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Gianpiero Francesca or Mauro Birattari.

Additional information

The main contributors to this research are G. Francesca and M. Birattari. AutoMoDe and Vanilla were conceived and developed by G. Francesca, M. Brambilla, A. Brutschy, V. Trianni, and M. Birattari. Chocolate was conceived by G. Francesca and M. Birattari. F. Mascia contributed to the implementation. L. Garattoni, R. Miletitch, G. Podevijn, A. Reina, and T. Soleymani acted as human experts: They defined the tasks on which the experimental analysis is performed and they developed control software via C-Human and U-Human. M. Salvaro developed and operated the software we used to track the robots and to compute the value of the objective functions. C. Pinciroli contributed his experience with the ARGoS simulator. The analysis of the results has been performed by G. Francesca, F. Mascia, and M. Birattari. Most of the manuscript has been drafted by G. Francesca and M. Birattari. M. Brambilla drafted the state of the art on manual design methods and V. Trianni the one on automatic design methods. L. Garattoni, R. Miletitch, G. Podevijn, A. Reina, and T. Soleymani drafted the paragraphs that describe the tasks. All authors read and commented the manuscript. The final editing has been performed by M. Birattari and G. Francesca, with notable contributions from C. Pinciroli and A. Brutschy. The research has been conceived and directed by M. Birattari.

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Francesca, G., Brambilla, M., Brutschy, A. et al. AutoMoDe-Chocolate: automatic design of control software for robot swarms. Swarm Intell 9, 125–152 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11721-015-0107-9

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