Fluids in Electrostatic Fields: An Analogy for Multirobot Control

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of controlling a large group of robots in a 2-D pattern generation task. Different from previous methodologies, our approach can be used in generic static environments, where obstacles may appear. This approach is based on the analogy with the simulation of fluids in electrostatic fields. By means of a weak coupling between the smoothed particle hydrodynamics and the finite element method we derive a scalable solution where decentralized controllers are provided