TerraSwarm funded paper “Fast Redistribution of a Swarm of Heterogeneous Robots” Receives Best Paper Award at the 9th EAI International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies

The paper, "Fast Redistribution of a Swarm of Heterogeneous Robots," received best paper award at the 9th EAI International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies in New York.  

The paper states: "The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of ONR grants N00014-15-1-2115 and N00014-14-1-05-10, ARL grand W911NF-08-2-0004, NSF grant IIS-1426840, and TerraSwarm, one of six centers of STARnet, a Semiconductor Research Corporation program sponsored by MARCO and DARPA."

Amanda Prorok, M. Ani Hsieh, Vijay Kumar. Fast Redistribution of a Swarm of Heterogeneous Robots. Proceedings of 9th EAI International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies, December, 3- 5, 2015, New York.

Abstract:
We present a method that distributes a swarm of heterogeneous robots among a set of tasks that require specialized capabilities in order to be completed. We model the system of heterogeneous robots as a community of species, where each species (robot type) is defined by the traits (capabilities) that it owns. Our method is based on a continuous abstraction of the swarm at a macroscopic level, as we model robots switching between tasks. We formulate an optimization problem that produces an optimal set of transition rates for each species, so that the desired trait distribution among the tasks is reached as quickly as possible. Our solution is based on an analytical gradient, and is computationally efficient, even for large choices of traits and species. Finally, we show that our method is capable of producing fast convergence times when compared to state-of-the-art methods.