OPTIMAL CONTROL OF ROBOTS BY DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING

A swarm of robots are adapted to an unknown environment by reinforcement learning. Each of the robots is able to scan the environment and to measure the distance to the next hindrance. The information collected by the robots are transferred in a wireless mode by the serial Bluetooth protocol to the central unit. This unit performs the backward recursion of Dynamic Programming to get the optimal route from one place to another for each of the robots. The general goal consists of finding the route with the minimal number of steps from the initial to the final point of a two dimensional area. The performance of the approach can be demonstrated by both the simulation and the real robots.