Achieving Connectivity Between Wide Areas Through Self-Organising Robot Swarms Using Embodied Evolution

Abruptions to the communication infrastructure might occur occasionally, where manual intervention by dedicated personnel is needed to fix the interruptions, restoring communication abilities. However, sometimes this can be dangerous to the personnel carrying out the task, which can be the case in environmental disasters like earthquakes or toxic spills or in the occurrence of fire. Therefore, personal risks can be minimised if autonomous robots are deployed to achieve the same outcome: to establish a communication link between two previously connected but distant sites. In this paper, we investigate the deployment of mobile ad hoc robots which relay traffic between two sites. In order to get the robots to locate themselves appropriately, we take inspiration from self-organisation and emergence in artificial life, where a common overall goal may be achieved if the correct local rules on the agents in the system are invoked. We integrate the aspect of connectivity between two sites into the multirobot simulation platform known as JBotEvolver. The robot swarm is composed of Thymio II robots. In addition, we compare three heuristics, of which one uses neuroevolution (evolution of neural networks) to show how self-organisation and embodied evolution can be used within the integration. Our use of embodiment in robotic controllers shows promising results and provides solid knowledge and guidelines for further investigations.