From Ants to Service Robots:
an Exploration in Stigmergy-Based
Navigation Algorithms
ALI ABDUL KHALIQ
Technology
Örebro Studies in Technology 79 I ÖREBRO 2018
ÖREBRO STUDIES IN TECHNOLOGY 79 2018
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ali abdul khaliq received his MSc degree in Robotics and Intelligent Systems from Örebro University, Sweden, in 2011. In 2012, he became a doctoral student at the Center of Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS) in Örebro, Sweden. His research interests include mobile robot naviga-tion, stigmergic algorithms for robots, and swarm robotics. In general, his research revolves around robots.
To navigate autonomously, a mobile robot needs to answer three fundamental questions: where am I? where am I going? and how will I go there? Answering these questions typically involves the use of expensive sensors and significant computations. Yet, many insects in nature perform robust, close-to-optimal goal directed navigation without having the luxury of sophisticated sensors, powerful computational resources, or even an inter-nally stored map. They do so by exploiting a simple but powerful principle called stigmergy: they use their environment as an external memory to store, read and share information. In this thesis, we explore the use of stigmergy as an alternative route to realize autonomous navigation in practical robotic systems. We define several stigmergic algorithms that allow robots to build maps, to use these maps to reach goals, and to perform human-aware naviga-tion. We formally analyse the properties of these algorithms, and empirically evaluate them both in simulation and with multiple physical robots. Results collected from tens of hours of real experiments and thousands of simulated runs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
issn 1650-8580 isbn 978-91-7529-253-3
