Constructing low-cost swarm robots that march in column formation

Abstract

Formation control is an important research topic in swarm robotics, as it enables each swarm robot to concentrate on its task by relying on others [1,2]. This paper is a brief summary of our endeavor for constructing low-cost swarm robots that march in column formation [4]. n = 5 swarm robots move in file, except the leading one each follows another one and all of them avoid perimeters of an indoor arena. We describe detailed settings of the control program for further studies. Our work focuses on real robots and is thus considered to be complementary to theoretical and simulation studies, cf. [3]. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.