Diffusion of Information in Robot Swarms

TL;DR

This paper explores communication strategies for robot swarms, focusing on virtual fields and epidemic algorithms, with experimental validation on microrobots to enhance information dissemination in large-scale or hardware-limited systems.

Contribution

It introduces and compares two communication approaches for robot swarms, including practical implementation and experimental validation with microrobots.

Findings

Virtual fields and epidemic algorithms effectively spread information in robot swarms.

Experimental results demonstrate feasibility on microrobots.

Communication methods are suitable for large-scale and hardware-constrained systems.

Abstract

This work is devoted to communication approaches, which spread information in robot swarms. These mechanisms are useful for large-scale systems and also for such cases when a limited communication equipment does not allow routing of information packages. We focus on two approaches such as virtual fields and epidemic algorithms, discuss several aspects of hardware implementation and demonstrate experiments performed with microrobots "Jasmine".