• Submit to Robotics Login Register
• MDPI
• Journals A-Z
• For Authors
• For Editors
• For Librarians
• About
• Open Access Policy

• Abstract
• Full-Text PDF [4806 KB]
• Article Versions Notes

• Article Statistics
• Google Scholar
• Order Reprints

• Cite this article
• Export to BibTeX
• Export to EndNote

• [+] on DOAJ
• Kuyucu, T
• Tanev, I
• Shimohara, K
• [+] on Google Scholar
• Kuyucu, T
• Tanev, I
• Shimohara, K
• [+] on PubMed
• Kuyucu, T
• Tanev, I
• Shimohara, K

•  CiteULike
•  Facebook
•  Mendeley
•  Twitter
• More services

Open AccessThis article is

• freely available
• re-usable

Robotics 2013, 2(3), 165-184; doi:10.3390/robotics2030165

Article

Hormone-Inspired Behaviour Switching for the Control of Collective Robotic Organisms

Tüze Kuyucu ^1,* , Ivan Tanev ^2,*  and Katsunori Shimohara ²

¹ Engineering Department, Griffith Textile Machines, Washington NE38 8QA, UK ² Department of Information Systems Design, Doshisha University, Kyotanabe 610-0321, Japan

* Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Received: 1 June 2013; in revised form: 15 July 2013 / Accepted: 16 July 2013 / Published: 24 July 2013

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Intelligent Robots)

Download PDF Full-Text [4806 KB, Updated Version, uploaded 25 July 2013 09:07 CEST]

The original version is still available [4774 KB, uploaded 24 July 2013 14:20 CEST]

Abstract: Swarming and modular robotic locomotion are two disconnected behaviours that a group of small homogeneous robots can be used to achieve. The use of these two behaviours is a popular subject in robotics research involving search, rescue and exploration. However, they are rarely addressed as two behaviours that can coexist within a single robotic system. Here, we present a bio-inspired decision mechanism, which provides a convenient way for evolution to configure the conditions and timing of behaving as a swarm or a modular robot in an exploration scenario. The decision mechanism switches among two behaviours that are previously developed (a pheromone-based swarm control and a sinusoidal rectilinear modular robot movement). We use Genetic Programming (GP) to evolve the controller for these decisions, which acts without a centralized mechanism and with limited inter-robot communication. The results show that the proposed bio-inspired decision mechanism provides an evolvable medium for the GP to utilize in evolving an effective decision-making mechanism.

Keywords: collective robotics; modular robotics; swarm robotics; hormone-inspired; XGP; Genetic Programming; reconfigurable robotics; pheromone-inspired

Article Statistics

Cite This Article