Control of robotic swarm behaviors based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Abstract

The paper presents a fluid dynamics based framework for control of emergent behaviors of robot swarms that are modeled as fluids. A distributed low-level control mechanism is developed based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and it is coupled with a high-level control layer that is responsible for the control of fluid parameters to generate desired behaviors from the swarming characteristics of the robots. It is shown by simulations that using the same low-level SPH model, different swarming behaviors can emerge from the local interactions of robots according to the settings of the fluid parameters that are controlled by the high-level control layer.