Simulation of Hardware Variations in Swarm Robots

Swarm robotic systems can offer advantages of robustness, flexibility and scalability, just like social insects. One assumption that is made by the majority of swarm robotic researchers, particularly in software simulation, is that a robotic swarm is a group of identical robots, there is no difference between any two of them. However, differences among hardware robots are unavoidable. These hardware differences, albeit small, affect the robots response to its environment. In this work, robots with hardware variation have been modeled and simulated in a line following scenario. It is found that even small hardware variations can result in behavioral heterogeneity. Although the variations can be compensated by the controllers in training, the hardware variation and resulting differences in controller settings are amplified in the non-linear interaction between robot and environment. Accordingly, the behavior of the identically trained robots in the same environment are subject to divergence.