Abstract
The task of shape formation in robot swarms can often be reduced to two tasks-assigning goal locations to each robot and creating a collision-free path to that goal. In this article, we present a distributed algorithm that solves these tasks concurrently, enabling a swarm of robots to move and form a shape quickly and without collision. A user can specify a desired shape as an image, send that to a swarm of identically programmed robots, and the swarm will move all robots to goal locations within the desired shape. This algorithm was executed on a swarm of up to 1024 simulated robots and a swarm of 100 real robots, showing that it reliably converges to all robots forming the shape.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 9000788 |
| Pages (from-to) | 597-612 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Robotics |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2020 |
Funding
This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. (Corresponding author: Michael Rubenstein.) Manuscript received November 6, 2019; accepted January 7, 2020. Date of publication February 17, 2020; date of current version June 4, 2020. This article was recommended for publication by Associate Editor N. Gans and Editor P. Robuffo Giordano upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. (Corresponding author: Michael Rubenstein.) H. Wang is with the Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60601 USA (e-mail: [email protected]).
Keywords
- Distributed robot systems
- multirobot systems
- swarms
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Computer Science Applications
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering