Spatially targeted communication and self-assembly

Abstract

We introduce spatially targeted communication - a communication method for multirobot systems. This method allows an individual message sending robot to isolate selected message recipient robots based on their spatial location. The recipient robots can then be sent information targeted solely at them, even if the sending robot uses a broadcast communication modality. We demonstrate spatially targeted communication using a heterogeneous multirobot system composed of flying robots and ground-based self-assembling robots. Flying robots use their privileged view of the environment to determine and communicate information to groups of ground-based robots on what morphologies to form to carry out upcoming tasks.