Triangular lattice formation in robot swarms with minimal local sensing

The problem of triangular lattice formation in robot swarms has been investigated extensively in the literature, but the existing algorithms can hardly keep comparative performance from swarm simulation to real multi-robot scenarios, due to the limited computation power or the restricted field of view (FOV) of robot sensors. Eventually, a distributed solution for triangular lattice formation in robot swarms with minimal sensing and computation is proposed and developed in this study. Each robot is equipped with a sensor with a limited FOV providing only a ternary digit of information about its neighbouring environment. At each time step, the motion command is directly determined by using only the ternary sensing result. The circular motions with a certain level of randomness lead the robot swarms to stable triangular lattice formation with high quality and robustness. Extensive numerical simulations and multi-robot experiments are conducted. The results have demonstrated and validated the efficiency of the proposed approach. The minimised sensing and computation requirements pave the way for massive deployment at a low cost and implementation within swarms of miniature robots.