Investigation of robotic swarms with partial team-goal knowledge

Abstract

This paper focuses on performance evaluation of such robotic swarms in which only a few members are aware of the swarm goal. In many robotic applications more than one robot is needed to complete a given task. In this case a swarm of robots can be applied to solve complex missions. It is not always necessary for every swarm member to be familiar with the goal of the team. We investigated some new performance metrics related to the swarm shape and motion in function of the swarm speed and the number of informed members. This work aims to provide a detailed examination on how robotic swarm performances such as speed, elongation, settling time are influenced by the number of robots knowing the goal. For the performance evaluation experiments were performed using a swarm of mobile robots in the V-REP simulation environment.