Abstract: We describe our research in using environmental visual landmarks as the basis for completing simple robot construction tasks. Inspired by honeybee visual navigation behavior, a visual template mechanism is proposed in which a natural landmark serves as a visual reference or template for distance determination as well as for navigation during collective construction. To validate our proposed mechanism, a wall construction problem is investigated and a minimalist solution is given. Experimental results show that, using the mechanism of a visual template, a collective robotic system can successfully build the desired structure in a decentralized fashion using only local sensing and no direct communication. In addition, a particular variable, which defines tolerance for alignment of the structure, is found to impact the system performance. By decreasing the value of the variable, system performance is improved at the expense of a longer construction time. The visual template mechanism is appealing in that it can use a reference point or salient object in a natural environment that is new or unexplored and it could be adapted to facilitate more complicated building tasks.

Key words: Biologically inspired, Swarm robotics, Collective construction, Visual landmark, Template

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