Control of energetic robotic swarm systems

Abstract

An M-Member robotic swarm system is studied in this paper. A controller is developed such that a swarm of wheeled mobile robots (WMR) can follow a desired trajectory with different swarm temperature. This control approach has two separate layers. The control approach in a lower layer is feedback linearization method which makes each WMR agent follow its desired trajectory. The upper layer is a temperature controller for a virtual swarm. The virtual swarm provides reference trajectory for energetic swarm of mobile robots. It is shown that a more thorough foraging behavior can be obtained at higher swarm temperature. Finally, simulation is used to validate the results and to demonstrate the new approach.