Path formation using a robot swarm with limited sensing capabilities

Abstract

In this paper, we present a swarm intelligence control mechanism for robot path formation. In our controller the robots form a linear chain between two points which the individual robots cannot detect simultaneously in a search space with obstacles. The controller is able to form a path in the environment with obstacles and exhibits good scalability and fault tolerance characteristics. The individual robots are limited in that they do not know where they are in the search space, cannot communicate with each other and cannot differentiate between obstacles and other robots. We study three distinct swarm sizes and observe that larger robot groups achieve success in less time and are more successful overall.