Moving Particle Semi-Implicit Method for Control of Swarm Robotic Systems

Abstract

The advancements of Multiple Robot Systems (MRS) have shown advantages over single robot systems. Generally, the motivations for the development of MRS are task flexibility, time efficiency, and single-point failure resiliency. The challenge in MRS, however, is the control and coordination of all the members in the system when performing tasks. Swarm robotics is a branch of MRS that deals with groups of homogeneous robots. The goal of swarm robotics is to produce systems that are scalable, flexible, and robust. The control of swarm robotic systems, however, looks to be one of the main challenges. These control concepts are inspired by biological swarms and, more recently, physics concepts. The success of the swarm's control algorithm will also lead to the swarm's ability to perform cooperative tasks. The use of homogeneous robots in swarm systems makes it advantageous to model the swarm robots as particles in a fluid. The Moving Particle Semi-Implicit (MPS) Method, a particle-based method in fluid dynamics, is proposed to be used as a control algorithm for swarm robotics.