ROS2swarm - A ROS 2 Package for Swarm Robot Behaviors

TL;DR

ROS2swarm is a new ROS 2 package that offers reusable, platform-independent primitives for swarm robot behaviors, simplifying development and experimentation across diverse hardware platforms.

Contribution

The paper introduces ROS2swarm, a modular ROS 2 package providing ready-to-use swarm behavioral primitives applicable to multiple robot platforms.

Findings

Successfully applied on three different robot platforms

Includes primitives like aggregation, dispersion, and collective decision-making

Facilitates easier development and experimentation in swarm robotics

Abstract

Developing reusable software for mobile robots is still challenging. Even more so for swarm robots, despite the desired simplicity of the robot controllers. Prototyping and experimenting are difficult due to the multi-robot setting and often require robot-robot communication. Also, the diversity of swarm robot hardware platforms increases the need for hardware-independent software concepts. The main advantages of the commonly used robot software architecture ROS 2 are modularity and platform independence. We propose a new ROS 2 package, ROS2swarm, for applications of swarm robotics that provides a library of ready-to-use swarm behavioral primitives. We show the successful application of our approach on three different platforms, the TurtleBot3 Burger, the TurtleBot3 Waffle Pi, and the Jackal UGV, and with a set of different behavioral primitives, such as aggregation, dispersion, and collective decision-making. The proposed approach is easy to maintain, extendable, and has good potential for simplifying swarm robotics experiments in future applications.