A swarm aggregation algorithm based on local interaction for multi-robot systems with actuator saturations

Abstract

We propose a swarm aggregation algorithm based on local interactions in the presence of saturations on the robot actuators. This assumption allows to better model the physical limitations of actual mobile robotic platforms. In our framework, robot-to-robot interactions are limited to the visibility neighborhood, i.e., to robots that are within the range of visibility of each other. A theoretical analysis of the convergence properties is presented for the proposed swarm aggregation algorithm. Extensive simulations have been performed to corroborate the theoretical results. In addition, experiments with a team of low-cost mobile robots have been carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.