Physicomimetics for Mobile Robot Obstacle Avoidance

Abstract

The ability of robots to promptly avoid obstacles and reach a goal while accurately maintaining a formation is extremely important for many swarm robotic tasks such as terrain analysis, search and rescue, and chemical plume source tracing. In prior work, using simulation, we established how Physicomimetics can be used to maintain swarms of mobile robots in formations that move towards a goal through an obstacle field. In this paper, we demonstrate the obstacle avoidance capability of Physicomimetics control algorithm using two different mobile robot platforms with limited hardware, Maxelbot and X80Pro.