This project is concerned with an investigation of simple communication between ANN-controlled mobile robots. Two robots are trained on a (seemingly) simple navigation task: to stay close to each other while avoiding collisions with each other and other obstacles.
A simple communication scheme is used: each of the robots receives some of the other robots’ outputs as inputs for an algorithm which produces extra inputs for the ANNs controlling the robots.
In the experiments documented here the desired cooperation was achieved. The different problems are analysed with experiments, and it is concluded that it is not easy to gain cooperation between autonomous mobile robots by using only output from one robot as input for the other in ANNs.