Three dimensional deployment of robot swarms

Abstract

This paper addresses the deployment problem for a swarm of autonomous mobile robots initially randomly distributed in 3 dimensional space. A fully decentralized geometric self-configuration approach is proposed to deploy individual robots at a given spatial density. Specifically, each robot interacts with three neighboring robots in a selective and dynamic fashion without using any explicit communication so that four robots eventually form a regular tetrahedron. Using such local interactions, the proposed algorithms enable a swarm of robots to span a network of regular tetrahedrons in a designated space. The convergence of the algorithms is theoretically proved using Lyapunov theory. Through extensive simulations, we validate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed algorithms.

Distributed control for geometric pattern formation of large-scale multirobot systems

“…Robustness to agents’ failure and the capability of detecting and repairing holes and gaps in the lattice are obtained via an ad hoc procedure and verified numerically. A 3D extension was later presented in Lee et al (2010) .…”

“… 3 First order models like (6) are often used in the literature Lee and Chong (2008) ; Lee et al (2010) ; Casteigts et al (2012) ; Zhao et al (2019) . In some other works Spears et al (2004) ; Sailesh et al (2014) a second order model is used, given by , where u i is a force, m is a mass and μ is a viscous friction coefficient.…”