Self-Organized Circling of Swarm Robots using Optical Communications

Morphogenetic engineering aims to develop self-organized methods to form the predesigned morphology of robot swarms. A simple method has been reported to form the circling morphology of fish robot swarms in experiments and of ground robot swarms in simulations. This method requires limited hardware of robots and minimum on-board communication, which makes it easy to scale up. The robot swarm on the ground, however, is significantly different from that underwater. Using our homemade Morphobot platform, we adapted this method to generate the circling morphology of a swarm of robots on the ground. For this application, we customized Morphobots with optical sensors and light emission devices. We first demonstrated the effectiveness of this adapted method. In self-organized systems, the relationship between the global pattern and the properties of individual robots is implicit. It is thus still challenging to design a controller for this type of dynamic system. To clarify this relationship in this circling morphogenesis, we evaluated the effects of two important features of robots on the formation of the circling pattern. We Second experimentally evaluated the effects of the moving radius and ranges of light emission of individual robots on the circling morphology. These results shine light on developing a reliable and rigid engineering methodology for swarm robotics.