ferherranz / swarm-robotic-formation-control

Bio-inspired Robotics Fall 2013 Course Project

Swarm-Robotic-Formation-Control

Bio-inspired Robotics Fall 2013 Course Project

Author

JingweiZhang, ChiLiu, andJiaZeng CarnegieMellonUniversity

Abstract

Social insect colonies possess remarkable abilities to select the best among several courses of action. In populous societies with highly efficient recruitment behavior, coordination is distributed across all individuals, each acting on limited local information with appropriate decision rules.

Nowadays, the development of robotic technology improves the capabilities of robots, and the robotic application fields are expanding all the time. People want the robots to accomplish more complicated tasks which cannot be achieved by single robot, therefore coordination among multi-robot has been put forward and become a hot topic now. Due to limited resources, multi-robot coordination has to solve the problem that how to make the robots cooperate with each other with high efficiency, and the cooperation can result in one of the most important advantages of the multi-mbot system which is the ability of a single robot can be enlarged. Space, as an important factor of multi-robot cooperation, has a large influence on the efficiency of multi-robot coordination. Inspired by the swarm behavior in nature, we build a system that enables multi-robot to form certain types of physical structure that ensures the space occupied by every robot enables the robots optimally formate, avoid collision and prepare them for future tasks.

In the following sections, related works including the natural origin, swarm robot and behavior based robotics are first introduced. In the next section, problem setup is introduced for the following implementation details. Flocking simulation, formation control and obstacle avoidance details are separately explained then. After the implementation we compare different simulation results and figure out the best parameter set in each formation control. Current limitations and future works are discussed in the end.

Keywords

swarm robotics, behavior, formation, obstacle avoidance.