Spatial awareness in robotic swarms through local wireless communications

  • Authors:

  • Frederick Ducatelle;Gianni A. Di Caro;Luca M. Gambardella

  • Affiliations:

  • Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), Lugano, Switzerland;Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), Lugano, Switzerland;Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), Lugano, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 3
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We propose a fully distributed approach to endow robots in a swarm with awareness of their relative position with respect to the rest of the swarm. Such spatial awareness can be used to support spatially differentiated task allocation or for pattern formation. The approach we propose only relies on local communications and is based on a combination of distributed consensus and load balancing. We test the effectiveness of our algorithm in extensive simulation tests and we also validate it in experiments with real robots.