Robust self-organization for swarm robots

Abstract

This paper presents a self-organizing scheme for multi-agent swarm systems based on coupled nonlinear oscillators (CNOs). In this scheme, unicycle robots self-organize to flock and arrange group formation through attractive and repulsive forces among themselves. It is also shown how localized distributed controls are utilized throughout group behaviors such as formation and migration. The proposed self-organization scheme maintains robust formation and provides reasonable accuracy in the face of significant positioning and movement error. In the paper, the proposed formation ensures safe separation and good cohesion performance among the robots. Several examples show that the proposed self-organizing scheme provides a robust formation behavior maintaining a constant variance value effectively.