  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.
