Decentralised Negotiation for Multi-Object Collective Transport with Robot Swarms

Recent developments of robot swarms with richer capabilities for sensing and manipulation of the environment have opened the door to more complex applications of swarm robotics. The introduction of such swarms in intralogistics, where workers are still at risk of injury, is of particular interest. We present a method to control a swarm of robots to simultaneously transport multiple items that are too heavy or too large for a single robot to carry. We introduce a decentralised negotiation strategy based on inter-robot communication, which allows the robots to coordinate with subgroups of the swarm. We then use genetic programming to evolve behaviour tree controllers that generate the desired action of each robot, which is then fed to the negotiation strategy to produce the final output.