A stigmergy-based aggregation method for swarm robotic system

Abstract

A stigmergy-based aggregation method for swarm robots is introduced in this paper. The method uses finite state machine and coding-based pheromone to coordinate the behavior of robots to accomplish aggregation tasks collaboratively. The robots behaviors are divided into three states by using the finite state machine. A coding-based pheromone generation rule is designed. Part of the robots leave pheromone trajectories with encoded form in the environment, and the other robots plan their motion according to the pheromone trajectories. Eventually all the robots gather to the specific area. RFID tags are arranged in the environment as the carriers of pheromone. Robots exchange information via the tags as they move over the tags and decide their next motion in accordance with the information obtained from the tags. Simulations and experiments are made to verify the method and the performance of real robots.