Swarm Robotics
The natural phenomena of swarms, characterized by grouping of a large number of entities, can be observed in many living beings such as flocks of birds and schools of fish. The inspiring aspect of these phenomena is that although the intelligence of the individual members of the swarm is limited, a sophisticated and efficient group behavior is still achieved. In the last few years, distributed coordination control of a large scale multi-agent dynamical system (e.g., robotic swarms) has invoked increasing interest in control and robotics community. A large group of mobile agents (e.g., mobile robots or mobile sensors), geared with computing, sensing and communication devices can serve as a platform for a variety of coordination tasks in civilian and military applications. In this project, we study the underlying mechanisms in natural swarms, develop a biologically inspired systematic methodology to analyze the behavior of a large group of mobile agents, and develop a unified framework for the controller design of a general range of coordinated motions of robotic swarms. We use algebraic graphs to model the topologies of the swarm that embody the neighborhood, communication or the sensing relations among the members. We consider the general situation that the swarm’s topology dynamically changes as the spacing among agents evolves with time. By exploiting the developed framework, we investigate and design scalable controllers for several specific application scenarios of the coordinated motion of the swarm, namely, mobilization, rendezvous and virtual leader tracking control.
