Virtual Forces based approach for target capture with swarm robots

Abstract

It discusses target capture principle and method that based on virtual forces with swarm robots, it also provides some performance metrics (such as stabilization time, layer number, distance between layers, robot number in a layer, distributing density and so on); Analyzing the relationship between the performance metrics with the robots number and the virtual force. Put forward the capture method that robot moves around the target, simulation results show that this method can solves the local minima problem, and greatly improves the capture speed and quality. We also design a physics robot experiment to verify capture method. At last, the directions of further research are proposed.