Concurrent design of control software and configuration of hardware for robot swarms under economic constraints

Designing a robot swarm is challenging due to its self-organized and distributed nature: complex relations exist between the behavior of the individual robots and the collective behavior that results from their interactions. In this paper, we study the concurrent automatic design of control software and the automatic configuration of the hardware of robot swarms. We introduce Waffle, a new instance of the AutoMoDe family of automatic design methods that produces control software in the form of a probabilistic finite state machine, configures the robot hardware, and selects the number of robots in the swarm. We test Waffle under economic constraints on the total monetary budget available and on the battery capacity of each individual robot comprised in the swarm. Experimental results obtained via realistic computer-based simulation on three collective missions indicate that different missions require different hardware and software configuration, and that Waffle is able to produce effective and meaningful solutions under all the experimental conditions considered.