Distributed cohesive configuration controller for a swarm with low-cost platforms

This study presents a cohesive configuration controller for distributed space coverage by a swarm of robots. The goal is to build a dense, convex network that is robust against disconnection while robots are flocking with only incomplete knowledge about the network. The controller is an integrated framework of two different algorithms. First, we present a boundary force algorithm: physics-based swarm intelligence that borrows the concept of surface tension force between liquid molecules. The combination of such a force with conventional flocking produces a convex and dense configuration without knowledge of the complete geometry of a robot network. Second, robots distributively determine when a configuration is on the verge of disconnection by identifying a local articulation point—a region where the removal of a single robot will change the local topology. When such a point is detected, robots switch their behavior to clustering, which aggregates them around the vulnerable region to remove every articulation point and retain a connected configuration. Finally, we introduced an index that objectively represents the level of risk of a robot configuration against the massive fragmentation, called vulnerability index. We provide theoretical performance analyses of each algorithm and validate the results with simulations and experiments using a set of low-cost robots.