The main objective for this research is to design an economical and robust swarm system to achieve formation control. The system combines swarm intelligence with centroidal Voronoi tessellations (CVT) to create desired static and dynamic formations. This paper also analyzes the affect of initial starting positions and robot number on formation performance. Experiments are conducted both in simulation and on an actual mobile robot platform which show the flexible and robust nature of CVTs over other formation control algorithms.

Swarm robotics is an innovative approach to the control and coordination of multi-agent systems that use naturally inspired swarm intelligent methods to perform tasks. A swarm based approach can decrease the complexity and the cost of designing a cooperative multi-robot system. This paper proposes a general engineering approach to develop a robotic swarm that focuses on how to synthesize an emergent behavior and the associated inputs to this end. We validate our methodology by engineering a swarm to simultaneously rendezvous on a stationary light source. Furthermore, we also considered the case when the light source is slowly moving. The design is simulated in NetLogo, an agent-based modeling software, and implemented on the MASnet robot platform. This work demonstrates the basic knowledge and tools required to engineer a robotic swarm.

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