Mixed Reality based Multi-Agent Robotics Framework for Artificial Swarm Intelligence Experiments

Submitted for "Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal" - Under Review

The term “Swarm Intelligence” is the collective behavior of a combination of many simple individuals, where they operate autonomously. “Swarm Robotics” is the application of swarm intelligence used in collective robotics. This has been a new approach to the coordination of mass of robots that are capable of local communication, decentralized controlling, autonomous and also operations based on biological inspiration senses.

Experiments in this area frequently necessitate a large number of robots with specialized hardware, which is typically expensive. In addition, it is necessary to conduct and test the experiments in a well-controlled environment. This is a common concern among researchers working in this field. So, the most common solution would be to use a simulator. However, it may not accurately reflect the complexities of real-world experimentation.

Therefore, we introduce a mixed reality framework that combines the two realities, allowing us to model and execute swarm behavioral experiments with a few real robots and an unconstrained number of virtual robot instances that emulate the characteristics of real robots.