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Prepared ByNirav Thakkar
Ajit Pawar
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Overview Introduction
Advantages
EvolutionAdaptation
Conclusion
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Introduction European project SYMBRION, dealing with self-
assembling of swarm of robots
Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms Commencement - February 2008
Funded by European Commission within program
Future and Emergent Technologies
SYMBRION taken from biological term symbiosis
Based on bio-inspired approaches and computational
paradigms
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Intro(cont ) Symbiosis represents the biological inspiration for the
further development of robotic systems
Symbiotic robotics
Each robot of the swarm is able to run as an individual orbe aggregated in an organism
The robots should be able to re-program themselves andadapt to varying environments
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Advantages In a swarm of robots the individual entities can profit
from cooperation, emerge new behaviors and can
increase the overall fitness
In a more advanced approach, robots work not only
collectively, but can also aggregate into multi-robot
organisms and can share energy, resources and
functionality
eg. when there is a large obstacle like gap or wall, which
robots cannot pass, so idea is that robots can aggregate
into larger artificial organisms and pass this obstacle
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Being equipped with adocking mechanism, therobots can autonomously
aggregate or disaggregate
Once the robots have beenconnected to each other,they are able to share
resources such ascomputational power orenergy over a common bussystem
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Aggregated organism can be treated as a large,distributed network
In order to achieve evolve-ability on hardware andsoftware level the robots have to be able tocommunicate over CAN-bus or ZigBee and share theirresources within the organism
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Evolution Robots are placed randomly in the arena and interact withone another whenever they come into communicationrange of the infrared equipment (about 6 cm)
Each robot signals its status via an infrared broadcast,which is emitted frequently (about 100 times per second)
Thus, robots can virtually perceive other robots despitetheir marginal sensory capabilities by reading theirbroadcasts.
The maximum lifetime is set to 100 seconds, which isenough to keep the population from going extinct andleads to a large number of generations in the one hour runtime of the robots
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Individuals die if their energy runs out and anotherfertilized robot may then implant its energy
The robot is selected depending on the energy levels aswell as the distance between the robots
The dead individual remains open for implantation fora certain period, after which the egg with the highestdowry is used to reprogram the controller
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Evolution(cont) Each robot wanders around the environment -forward
movement
Each robot has an internal energy level
full at birth and linearly decreases over time
Once energy is depleted, the robot is considered deadand is free for insemination by another robot
As a consequence, the amount of energy the robot iswilling to invest to win a bidding process forinseminating dead robots directly impacts thereproduction ability of the individual.
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Evolution(cont) Therefore we transfer biological principles to the robot
platform
As a result, new genes with new functionality can appear,which can increase the fitness of an individual or of the
whole organism
By studying the genome structures and the evolutionary
process we should be able to deduce general principles ofevolution
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Adaptation Different levels of adaptation
Should be able to adapt on s/w as well as on mechanicaland electronics part
Mechanical evolve-ability
Mechanical -> Once made hard to change
So build small module that can organize into large
organisms No evolve-ability on separate modules
However organism can change its own morphology and itsfunctionality
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Evolve-ability of Electronics part
Small modules wired to a common electronics sys
Depending on the role of swarm members, one or morePCBs implemented
PCBs
Core
Shadow
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Core PCB ARM Cortex M3 Takes care of locomotion, sensing etc
RTOS: ensures real time ability
Shadow PCB Xscale mp SoC: allows direct interface to camera, laser scanner, sensors
and actuators Embedded Linux with 600MHz freq Covers tasks like strategy calculation and selection,
adaptation and trajectory planning Sleep mode to save power
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Comm. between different main boards withinorganism is possible through docking
Docking allows wired connection of CAN bus Common power bus
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Adaptive software framework Robots can be treated as
Stand-alone units
Swarm Organism
Swarm of organism
Each state of aggregation have diff requirements
s/w has to be extendable and modular A common genome structure and interfaces for learning
have to be implemented
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Role of s/w framework is to abstract functions of lowerlevel to higher level
Robot runtime system has to band both processors to
coordinate in order to divide workload Robot runtime system provides basic comm channels
like ZigBee or CAN and controls power consumption
RTOS will take care of basic operations
Middleware support
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High-level controller
Middleware
Robot1
Core Shadow
Robot2
Core Shadow
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High-Level Controller Runs on robot and has internal and external stimuli as
inputs
Can change internal states
Can trigger o/p like sensors and actuators Sensor fusion module
Data from fusion module sent for learning
Learning engine integrates new functions based onprocessed data in fusion module
Genome maps the controller behavior into inheritableinfo
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References Florian Schlachter, Eugen Meister, Serge Kernbach and Paul Levi Evolve-ability of
the robot platform in the Symbrion project 2008 IEEE
Guy Baele, Nicolas Bredeche, Evert Haasdijk, Steven Maere, Nico Michiels Open-ended On-board Evolutionary Robotics for Robot Swarms 2009 IEEE
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THANK YOU
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