Cooperative Passing Based on Chaos Theory for Multiple Robot Swarms

Abstract

Swarm robotics can cooperatively perform large, multiple tasks by controlling a swarm composed of many robots. Currently, approaches for operating multiple robot swarms are being studied for further evolution of this system. This study addresses a multiple movement task in which robot swarms move collectively in the same environment. In this task, the movement paths of robot swarms must pass each other in a cooperative manner when they intersect. The robots in this system behave under autonomous distributed control, thus must consider a passing behavior suitable for their own situation. This study proposes a turning behavior based on the chaos theory to ensure that a robot swarm avoids other approaching robot swarms. Each robot swarm applying the proposed method passes other swarms while autonomously deciding its turning direction and continuing its own collective movement task. In addition, the decision making based on the chaos theory predicts future values according to the current value. Therefore, it is expected to be useful for task scheduling. The performance of multiple robots passing each other is evaluated with the proposed method using numerical simulations. This performance shows that the robot swarms can avoid each other without collision using the closest inter-robot distance as the evaluation metric. Finally, robot swarms with varying shapes and scales complete their own movements in an environment where these movement paths intersect at a single point.