Self-organized flocking with an heterogeneous mobile robot swarm

Abstract

In this paper, we study self-organized flocking in a swarm of behaviorally heterogeneous mobile robots: aligning and nonaligning robots. Aligning robots are capable of agreeing on a common heading direction with other neighboring aligning robots. Conversely, non-aligning robots lack this capability. Studying this type of heterogeneity in self-organized flocking is important as it can support the design of a swarm with minimal hardware requirements. Through systematic simulations, we show that a heterogeneous group of aligning and non-aligning robots can achieve good performance in flocking behavior. We further show that the performance is affected not only by the proportion of aligning robots, but also by the way they integrate information about their neighbors as well as the motion control employed by the robots.