Robot formations using local sensing and limited range vision

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of developing intelligent multi-robot team capable of collaborating to achieve team objectives. The proposed work focuses on robot formations and how robot team-mates could face many complex situations. In order to do this a new vision technique is proposed. There is neither global information nor a predefined team leader available. A behavior based controller is proposed and implemented to give the robot teammates the ability to cooperate in constructing different robot formations. A simulated team of robots based on the well known robot simulator Webots is constructed to validate the proposed approaches. Different robot formations' experiments are conducted. The experiments show also how to the robot team could solve many difficult tasks such as large swerving angles or passage through narrow corridors.