Convex Shape Generation by Robotic Swarm

Abstract

Forming a predetermined spatial shape is one of the most important problems of modern swarm robotics. The work presented here focuses on the motion planning for the swarm of identical robots in the task of spatial reconfiguration. The main requirement is that the reconfiguration must be collision free, that is, at each moment the pairwise distances between robots should not be smaller than some fixed minimal admissible distance. A collision-free navigation algorithm that generates a prescribed convex surface is presented. It includes trajectory computation combined with delay assignment. The computer simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm works efficiently even for big swarms.