RoboMaze: Swarm Robotics and Coordinated Navigation in Smart City

Abstract

Swarm robotics and coordinated navigation have many important applications in smart cities. For example, on the street, autonomous cars may coordinate with each other to optimize the routes and city traffic; in a building, multiple robots may allow the coordinated search of trapped people in the building after a fire or natural hazard. It is important to study how to design and optimize the coordinated search strategy in those complicated smart city environments. This paper introduces RoboMaze, a simulator for swarm robotics and coordinated navigation study, where the robots may communicate with each other and optimize their paths with the goal of completing the search in a minimum amount of time. RoboMaze has been implemented and demonstrated in multiple software and hardware platforms. It not only greatly facilitates the development and test of new algorithms, but also serves as a wonderful education and outreach tool for smart city awareness.