Follow-the-leader formation marching through a scalable O(log<inf>2</inf>n) Parallel Architecture.

Abstract

An important topic in the field of Multi Robot Systems focuses on motion coordination and synchronization for formation keeping. Although several works have addressed such problem, little attention has been devoted to study the computational complexity within the framework of large-scale systems. This paper presents our current work on how to achieve high computational performance for systems composed by a large number of robots that must fulfill with a marching and formation task. A scalable Multi-Processor Parallel Architecture is introduced with the purpose of achieving scalability, i.e., computation time of O(log <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> n) for a n-robots system. Our architecture has been tested onto a multi-processor system and validated against several simulations testing.