Distributed dynamic density coverage for human-swarm interactions

Abstract

This paper presents two approaches to externally influence a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. Recently developed continuous-time algorithms move the robots so as to provide optimal coverage of a given the time-varying density functions. This makes it possible for a human operator to abstract away the number of robots and focus on the general behavior of the team of robots as a whole. Using a distributed approximation to this algorithm whereby the robots only need to access information from adjacent robots allows these algorithms to scale well with the number of robots. Simulations and robotic experiments show that the desired behaviors are achieved.