A triangular formation strategy for collective behaviors of robot swarm

Abstract

This paper presents, a novel decentralized control strategy, named Triangular Formation Algorithm (TFA), for a swarm of simple robots. The TFA is a local interaction strategy which basically makes three neighboring robots to form a regular triangular lattice. This strategy requires minimal conditions for robots and it can be easily realized with real robots. The TFA is executed by every member of the swarm asynchronously. For swarm obstacle avoidance, a simplified artificial physical model is introduced to work with the TFA. Simulation results showed that the global behaviors of swarm such as aggregation, flocking and obstacle avoidance in an unknown environment can be achieved using the TFA and obstacle avoidance mechanism. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.