Autonomous fault tolerant multi-robot cooperation using artificial immune system

Multi-robot cooperation is an active research field where researchers have proposed different cooperation strategies. However, most of them have not considered fault tolerance, which will be critical when one or more robots fail during cooperation. In this paper we propose a self regulated fault tolerant multi-robot cooperation system based on the principles of artificial immune systems. The proposed approach relies on broadcasting of the capability and cost function of a robot that is required for cooperation while also taking care of partial and full failure of a robot during the communication for cooperation. In our system, a robot is regarded as an antibody and its environment as an antigen. The communication and cooperation strategies are inspired by Jernpsilas idiotypic network theory and the structure of the antibody. The developed methodology is verified by simulation.