Integrating Ant Colony Clustering Method to a Multi-Robot System Using Mobile Agents

This paper presents a framework for controlling mobile multiple robots connected by communication networks. This framework provides novel methods to control coordinated systems using mobile agents. The combination of the mobile agent and mobile multiple robots opens a new horizon of efficient use of mobile robot resources. Instead of physical movement of multiple robots, mobile software agents can migrate from one robot to another so that they can minimize energy consumption in aggregation. The imaginary application is making "carts," such as found in large airports, intelligent. Travelers pick up carts at designated points but leave them arbitrary places. It is a considerable task to re-collect them. It is, therefore, desirable that intelligent carts (intelligent robots) draw themselves together automatically. Simple implementation may be making each cart has a designated assembly point, and when they are free, automatically return to those points. It is easy to implement, but some carts have to travel very long way back to their own assembly point, even though it is located close to some other assembly points. It consumes too much unnecessary energy so that the carts have to have expensive batteries. In order to ameliorate the situation, we employ mobile software agents to locate robots scattered in a field, e.g. an airport, and make them autonomously determine their moving behaviors by using a clustering algorithm based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). ACO is the swarm intelligence-based methods, and a multi-agent system that exploit artificial stigmergy for the solution of combinatorial optimization problems. Preliminary experiments have provided a favorable result. In this paper, we focus on the implementation of the controlling mechanism of the multi-robots using the mobile agents.