Dispersal, queueing and navigation of swarm robots using color and geometric constraints

Abstract

Swarm robotics is a recent approach to the autonomous control and coordination of a collection of relatively simple locally-interacting robots with decentralized decision making and employing behavioral algorithms inspired by optimization principles practiced by social insects. Among its advantages are concurrent execution of subtasks in task-decomposable application domains, robustness against system failure, scalability, flexibility in adapting to a different domain through reconfiguration, and cost effectiveness. In this research we investigate the potential of using color and geometry inferred from distance scanner and vision sensors for uniform dispersal, queueing and navigation of multiple autonomous robots. Simulation experiments showed the validity of several techniques that were developed for these tasks.