Brain Storm Robotics: An Automatic Design Framework for Multi-Robot Systems

Jian Yang, Yang Shen, Yuhui Shi

Abstract: Designing the collaborative mechanism is a fundamental problem for the multi-robot systems. It aims to determine the perception, communication, and motion strategies for a single robot to obtain the desired behavior at the system level. Generally, we can use manual design and automatic design, or the combination of the above two approaches for particular system behavior. With the increasing of task complexity and the uncertainty of surroundings, the adaptability and autonomy are hard to achieve with manual design approaches. By using the mechanism of learning or evolution, automatic design can generate sensor configurations, communication parameters, as well as control strategies automatically, which has been widely concerned in recent years. In this paper, the brainstorming method of collaborative problem-solving in human society is introduced into the design of multi-robot systems. This paper proposes an automatic design framework: Brain Storm Robotics(BSR), in which the system architecture, the representation of ideas, and the generation of new ideas are discussed. The effectiveness of the proposed BSR framework is verified by an example of designing an aggregation behavior for a swarm of robots. The results show that the control strategy designed by this framework is more efficient than that designed manually, which has outstanding development prospects. The future researches for the development of this potential framework are also discussed.