Automatic off-line design is an attractive approach to implementing robot swarms. In this approach, a designer specifies a mission for the swarm, and an optimization process generates suitable control software for the individual robots through computer-based simulations. Most relevant literature has focused on effectively transferring control software from simulation to physical robots. For the first time, we investigate (i) whether control software generated via automatic design is transferable across robot platforms and (ii) whether the design methods that generate such control software are themselves transferable. We experiment with two ground mobile platforms with equivalent capabilities. Our measure of transferability is based on the performance drop observed when control software and/or design methods are ported from one platform to another. Results indicate that while the control software generated via automatic design is transferable in some cases, better performance can be achieved when a transferable method is directly applied to the new platform.

翻译：自动离线设计是实现机器人群体的一种有吸引力的方法。在该方法中，设计者指定群体的任务，并通过基于计算机的仿真优化过程生成适用于个体机器人的控制软件。相关文献大多聚焦于将控制软件从仿真有效迁移至实体机器人。我们首次探究以下问题：(i) 通过自动设计生成的控制软件是否可在不同机器人平台间迁移；(ii) 生成此类控制软件的设计方法本身是否具备可迁移性。我们使用两个具有等效能力的地面移动平台进行实验。可迁移性的度量基于控制软件和/或设计方法从一个平台移植到另一个平台时观测到的性能下降。结果表明，尽管在某些情况下通过自动设计生成的控制软件可被迁移，但当将可迁移的方法直接应用于新平台时，可实现更优性能。