Ant-inspired Walling Strategies for Scalable Swarm Separation: Reinforcement Learning Approaches Based on Finite State Machines

In natural systems, emergent structures often arise to balance competing demands. Army ants, for example, form temporary "walls" that prevent interference between foraging trails. Inspired by this behavior, we developed two decentralized controllers for heterogeneous robotic swarms to maintain spatial separation while executing concurrent tasks. The first is a finite-state machine (FSM)-based controller that uses encounter-triggered transitions to create rigid, stable walls. The second integrates FSM states with a Deep Q-Network (DQN), dynamically optimizing separation through emergent "demilitarized zones." In simulation, both controllers reduce mixing between subgroups, with the DQN-enhanced controller improving adaptability and reducing mixing by 40-50% while achieving faster convergence.

Joint Communication and Motion Planning for Cobots

The increasing deployment of robots in co-working scenarios with humans has revealed complex safety and efficiency challenges in the computation robot behavior. Movement among humans is one of the most fundamental -- and yet critical -- problems in this frontier. While several approaches have addressed this problem from a purely navigational point of view, the absence of a unified paradigm for communicating with humans limits their ability to prevent deadlocks and compute feasible solutions. This paper presents a joint communication and motion planning framework that selects from an arbitrary input set of robot's communication signals while computing robot motion plans. It models a human co-worker's imperfect perception of these communications using a noisy sensor model and facilitates the specification of a variety of social/workplace compliance priorities with a flexible cost function. Theoretical results and simulator-based empirical evaluations show that our approach efficiently computes motion plans and communication strategies that reduce conflicts between agents and resolve potential deadlocks.