The natural phenomena of swarms, characterized by grouping of a large and arbitrary 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 decade, distributed coordination control of a large scale swarm system (including 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 principles in swarms, develop a biologically inspired systematic methodology to analyze the behavior of a large group of mobile agents, and develop a unified theory framework for designing controllers for any motion coordination of robotic swarms. We utilize algebraic graphs to model the topology 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.
The figures on the left simulate a swarm of 20 mobile robots move together in a formation while avoiding an obstacle (the black sphere).
Leading Faculty: Dr. Li and Dr. Ma
Students: Leonardo Chiang, Tenzing Rabgyal, Victor Liang,