Swarm and Blockcahin based 2-d Constructive System
Swarm systems are systems where independently simple entities on collabration with the same entities make intelligent decisions. It is proven that swarms require a decentralised system to make decisions and block-chain is a well established decentralised system.
- This is the proposed arena . The Task will be done in the following way:
- There will be a overhead camera which will scan the block positions and the bots will get the informations about the blocks from the blockspace to the workspace .
- There should be a set of constraints like a red block should be on the left and green on the right and so on. This reduces the central dependency of some entity to sort the work for the bots. The actions that a bot should know are: Left,Right,Forward,Backward,pick,place,sensing the obstacles(other bots) and color detection. It is done to make the bots dumb so that they dont know the whole information about whats going on This also brings a lot of randomness into the Task as different results are occured everytime the same configuration is kept . This is because of the small differences in the arena everytime occurs like the speed of the bots would be different etc and a lot of other differences.
- So communication plays a important role here. So every bot has a copy of all the transcations. Transactions here mean picking and placing of the blocks. So every bot has a copy of all the transactions done so far. So according to the constraints every bot gets to know the location of the block to be placed. A sample example for communicating between the bots would be as shown(by using blockchain)
To make things interesting, we can make collective decisions and one bot can help the other by having smarts contracts.
- Whenever a bot wants to make decision lets say there are 3-4 block red blocks and the bot is confused which one to pick so it creates a accountno:(similar to a election ballet paper) and the bot s have to pay some money into it the the accountno with the highest balace is the block it chooses.
- If a particular bot needs a help for picking a block or something it creates a smart contract for picking and placing the the blocks.
To actually test the algorithm before optimising on the factors like battery and power consumption. It will be good to have two microcontrollers. The embedded one will be controlled by Nano and the higher level commands using pyhton so Ras-pi. Communication will be done using wifi. All the bots will be connected by sockets by having p2p network among themselves and in a bot the connection will be serially. So basic flow will be : 1.A bot goes to the workspace and checks for the block to be picked(to be decided on the logic) 2.It picks a block and feeds it into the path planning module, which gives the coordinates to be traversed(by taking into the short paths and obstacles etc). This coordinates are converted into the simple commads of left right etc and fed to the nano 3.Nano completes the path and acknowledges to the raspi once after one task is done and waits for the next task . Here by tasks it could be like picking a block taking a right or even a complete path of picking and placing a block.
The whole work+blockspace can be broken into grids
The whole space can be broken into grids and every grid can have 6 degrees of movement and accordingly using A* algorithm the shortest path could be found out .
This is the rough model of the bot The picking-mech and and the raspi go on the top floor and the nano and embedded hardware go on the bottom floor there will be proximity sensors all around the bot. Preferably 45 degrees to each other
