Exploration en essaim robotique intégrant un retour visuel pour l’opérateur

Abstract

The use of robotics is gaining in popularity in many different spheres of the industry due to the new possibilities the robots offer. Particularly because of their capacity to record information and their capacity to work in hard to get places for humans, mobile robots are the perfect companions for exploration missions, no matter where they are. With their robustness and modularity, robot swarms are better adapted than other systems to perform in an exploration scenario. The use of decentralized control enables all robots to adapt autonomously to different situations and the homogeneity of the robots permits a replacement of a faulty robot quickly and autonomously. First inspired from flocks of birds or ant colonies, robot swarms are developing fast and will be deployed in real scenarios soon. Nonetheless, a critical aspect of the robot swarms deployment is still underdeveloped : the interaction between the operator and the robots. Swarm control can put a high cognitive load on the operator, especially because understanding the swarm behavior is not intuitive. We thus try to improve the swarm state recognition by creating a feedback from swarm expressive motions. During an exploration mission, robots need to communicate to the operator when an event necessitating the user input happens. We thus design expressive movements for the robots to be able to communicate these messages to the operator by improving the legibility of the robots. Using the Buzz programming language, we use swarm intelligence algorithms in a completely decentralized manner to create a fully functional solution for visual feedback in an exploration mission. We first use a robust chain mapping exploration algorithm to fulfill the mission. When required, we transfer non essential robots to an acyclic graph formation algorithm where they can create the swarm expressive motions and communicate with the operator. These scripts are tested on a swarm of small tabletop robots called Zooids with the goal of creating a user study.

Date	23 Aug 2022
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	David St-Onge (Supervisor)