Mixed Reality Environment and High-Dimensional Continuification Control for Swarm Robotics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mixed reality platform combining real and virtual robots to test continuum-based control methods for large-scale swarm robotics, extending these methods to higher dimensions and validating their effectiveness experimentally.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid experimental setup for swarm robotics and extends continuification control techniques to higher dimensions, with experimental validation.

Findings

The platform effectively tests large-scale swarm behaviors.

Continuification control methods are validated in higher-dimensional settings.

The study provides new theoretical insights into continuum-based swarm control.

Abstract

Many new methodologies for the control of large-scale multi-agent systems are based on macroscopic representations of the emerging system dynamics, in the form of continuum approximations of large ensembles. These techniques, that are developed in the limit case of an infinite number of agents, are usually validated only through numerical simulations. In this paper, we introduce a mixed reality set-up for testing swarm robotics techniques, focusing on the macroscopic collective motion of robotic swarms. This hybrid apparatus combines both real differential drive robots and virtual agents to create a heterogeneous swarm of tunable size. We also extend continuification-based control methods for swarms to higher dimensions, and assess experimentally their validity in the new platform. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of the platform for conducting large-scale swarm robotics experiments, and it contributes new theoretical insights into control algorithms exploiting continuification approaches.