Local Oriented Potential Fields: Self Deployment and Coordination of an Assembling Swarm of Robots

Abstract

In the fields of swarm and modular robotics, one of the main challenges is to deploy and coordinate the robots in ways that are useful for solving different tasks. The aim of the research we are presenting is to create a self-organizing deployment and coordination system to improve the assembling phase of a group of robots capable of docking with each other. To achieve the presented goal a new technique, namely the “local oriented potential fields,” is combined with physicomimetics (artificial physics) and the behavioral coordination paradigm. The proposed solution offers a way to create four different types of deployments (square, line, star and tree), providing specific properties during the assembly and the solution of tasks. Simulations with NetLogo are used to prove the validity of the proposed ideas.