An Adaptable Oscillator-Based Controller for Autonomous Robots

This paper proposes a unique oscillator-based robot controller with learning abilities to effectively guide a team of robots operating in uncertain environments. To verify this, we designed four separate controllers and compared their performance in a series of tests in several different environments. The experiments used a team of three robots to explore arenas with variable lighting and different obstacle patterns, with a goal of having the team as a whole absorb as much light as possible. The four controllers were: a reactive controller, an oscillator with fixed parameters, an oscillator whose parameters changed based on the pattern of sensor information received, and an oscillator-based controller that used reinforcement learning. Experiments confirmed that the proposed method outperforms the others in all environments tested. This material is based upon work supported in part by the U.S. Army Research Office under grant/contract number DAAG55-98-1-0011.