A Swarm Engineering Approach to Mobile Sensor Network Design Towards Collaborative Phototaxis With A Slowly Moving Light Source

Abstract

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.

Distributed Navigation of Multi-Robot Systems For Sensing Coverage

“…In [299], the authors propose a general engineering approach to synthesis of a mobile sensor network for a cooperative phototaxis task. In this Phototaxis, the robots move towards a directional light stimulus.…”

“…Similar to [299], the research work [301] uses centroidal Voronoi tessellations (CVT) based approach to achieve cooperative phototaxis. The array of stationary sensors characterizes the environment creating a CVT and the actuators move according to the tessellation achieving a cooperative phototaxis.…”