Segregation of Heterogeneous Robotics Swarms via Convex Optimization

Abstract

The division of labor amongst a heterogeneous swarm of robots increases the range and sophistication of the tasks the swarm can accomplish. To efficiently execute a task the swarm of robots must have some starting organization. Over the past decade segregation of robotic swarms has grown as a field of research drawing inspiration from natural phenomena such as cellular segregation. A variety of different approaches have been undertaken to devise control methods to organize a heterogeneous swarm of robots. In this work, we present a convex optimization approach to segregate a heterogeneous swarm into a set of homogeneous collectives. We present theoretical results that show our approach is guaranteed to achieve complete segregation and validate our strategy in simulation and experiments.