Abstract
Formation control in a robot swarm targets the overall swarm shape and relative positions of individual robots during navigation. Existing approaches often use a global reference or have limited topology flexibility. We propose a novel approach without these constraints, by extending the concept of ‘mergeable nervous systems’ to establish distributed asymmetric control via a self-organized wireless communication network. In simulated experiments with UAVs and mobile robots, we present a proof-of-concept for three sub-tasks of formation control: formation establishment, maintenance during motion, and deformation. We also assess the fault tolerance and scalability of our approach.
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Acknowledgements
This work is partially supported by the Program of Concerted Research Actions (ARC) of the Université libre de Bruxelles, by the Office of Naval Research Global (Award N62909-19-1-2024), by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 846009, and by the China Scholarship Council Award No 201706270186. Marco Dorigo and Mary Katherine Heinrich acknowledge support from the Belgian F.R.S.-FNRS, of which they are a Research Director and a Postdoctoral Researcher respectively.
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Zhu, W., Allwright, M., Heinrich, M.K., Oğuz, S., Christensen, A.L., Dorigo, M. (2020). Formation Control of UAVs and Mobile Robots Using Self-organized Communication Topologies. In: Dorigo, M., et al. Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12421. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60376-2_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60376-2_25
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