Controlling Robot Swarm Aggregation through a Minority of Informed Robots

TL;DR

This paper presents a simplified decentralized algorithm for robot swarms to self-aggregate at target sites, replicating previous complex controller results with enhanced portability and flexibility.

Contribution

A simplified control approach for robot swarm aggregation that maintains performance while improving adaptability and ease of implementation.

Findings

Simplified controller replicates complex controller performance

Enhanced flexibility in operating conditions

Improved portability to physical robots

Abstract

Self-organized aggregation is a well studied behavior in swarm robotics as it is the pre-condition for the development of more advanced group-level responses. In this paper, we investigate the design of decentralized algorithms for a swarm of heterogeneous robots that self-aggregate over distinct target sites. A previous study has shown that including as part of the swarm a number of informed robots can steer the dynamic of the aggregation process to a desirable distribution of the swarm between the available aggregation sites. We have replicated the results of the previous study using a simplified approach: we removed constraints related to the communication protocol of the robots and simplified the control mechanisms regulating the transitions between states of the probabilistic controller. The results show that the performances obtained with the previous, more complex, controller can be replicated with our simplified approach which offers clear advantages in terms of portability to the physical robots and in terms of flexibility. That is, our simplified approach can generate self-organized aggregation responses in a larger set of operating conditions than what can be achieved with the complex controller.