Cooperative object transport in distributed multi-robot systems requires the coordination and synchronisation of pushing/pulling forces by a group of autonomous robots in order to transport items that cannot be transported by a single agent. The results of this study show that fairly robust and scalable collective transport strategies can be generated by robots equipped with a relatively simple sensory apparatus (i.e. no force sensors and no devices for direct communication). In the experiments described in this paper, homogeneous groups of physical e-puck robots are required to coordinate and synchronise their actions in order to transport a heavy rectangular cuboid object as far as possible from its starting position to an arbitrary direction. The robots are controlled by dynamic neural networks synthesised using evolutionary computation techniques. The best evolved controller demonstrates an effective group transport strategy that is robust to variability in the physical characteristics of the object (i.e. object mass and size of the longest object’s side) and scalable to different group sizes. To run these experiments, we designed, built, and mounted on the robots a new sensor that returns the agents’ displacement on a 2D plane. The study shows that the feedback generated by the robots’ sensors relative to the object’s movement is sufficient to allow the robots to coordinate their efforts and to sustain the transports for an extended period of time. By extensively analysing successful behavioural strategies, we illustrate the nature of the operational mechanisms underpinning the coordination and synchronisation of actions during group transport.

中文翻译：

---

大量e-puck机器人进行协作对象运输：进化的集体策略的鲁棒性和可扩展性

分布式多机器人系统中的协作对象运输需要一组自主机器人协调和同步推/拉力，以便运输单个代理无法运输的物品。这项研究的结果表明，配备有相对简单的传感设备（即没有力传感器也没有直接通信的设备）的机器人可以生成相当健壮和可扩展的集体运输策略。在本文所述的实验中，需要均匀的物理e-puck机器人组来协调和同步其动作，以便将重的长方体物体从其起始位置尽可能地移到任意方向。机器人由使用进化计算技术合成的动态神经网络控制。进化最好的控制器演示了一种有效的组传输策略，该策略对对象的物理特性（即，对象质量和最长对象侧的大小）的可变性具有鲁棒性，并且可以扩展到不同的组大小。为了进行这些实验，我们设计，构建并在机器人上安装了一个新的传感器，该传感器可以返回特工在二维平面上的位移。研究表明，机器人的传感器相对于物体运动产生的反馈足以使机器人协调其努力并在较长时间内维持运输。通过广泛分析成功的行为策略，