Self-organized flocking with a mobile robot swarm

ABSTRACT

This paper studies self-organized flocking in a swarm of mobile robots. We present Kobot, a mobile robot platform developed specifically for swarm robotic studies, briefly describing its sensing and communication abilities. In particular, we describe a scalable method that allows the robots to sense the orientations of their neighbors using a digital compass and wireless communication. Then we propose a behavior for a swarm of robots that creates self-organized flocking by using heading alignment and proximal control. The flocking behavior is observed to operate in three phases: alignment, advance, and avoidance. We evaluate four variants of this behavior by setting its parameters to extreme values and analyze the performance of flocking using a number of metrics, such as order and entropy. Our results show that, the flocking behavior obtained under appropriate parameter values, is quite robust and generates successful self-organized flocking in constraint environments.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.9 Robotics

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
flocking, self-organization, swarm robotics