An RSS-based triangulation method for robot tracking in robotic swarms

Abstract

Robotic swarm designers aim to increase the functionality of their swarms while maintaining the lowest possible cost of the individual robots. This usually results in robots with very limited sensing and computing capabilities. These limited capabilities make it necessary to develop algorithms and methodologies to enable the robots to perform tasks such as tracking, following, and navigation functions. This paper addresses the particular problem of a robot tracking another robot in the swarm. We suggest a method that combines the radio signal strength between the two robots with trigonometry to achieve an effective tracking methodology. The results show that, compared to the commonly used traditional method, our suggested one can, on average, perform the same follow job by traveling almost half the distance while taking only on average 20% of the navigation time needed in the traditional methods.