SociBuilder: A novel task-oriented swarm robotic system

This paper presents a novel concept of swarm robots, which mostly emphasizes on organization structure, rather than merely the quantity. A novel task-oriented swarmrobotic system (SociBuilder system) that is self-reconfigurable and supports self-assembly is introduced. The system simulates human labor division and social organization structure, thus it could represent human construction activities. SociBuilder System mainly consists of four parts: active region, socibots, warehouses and modules. Moreover, we propose a novel swarm system hierarchy, which includes three layers: human-computer interaction (HCI) layer, task planning layer and execution layer. In the planning layer, we designe eight parts to actualize task-oriented mechanism, which are visual task analysis, task decomposition, task allocation, self-organization structure, action planning, expansion mechanism, sensor data analysis and derated analysis respectively. Besides, we displayed structures of Socibots and docking mechanism for self-assembly and self-reconfiguration in detail. Finally, three scenario simulations are implemented successfully including self-assembly task, cooperative task and building task.