Initial robots formation for clustering and information networking in a robot swarm
Yuiko Tanaka, Shinsuke Hara · Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications · 2011
In a robot swarm, full wireless connection among all robots is always required to keep the intelligence of the swarm and the motions thus locations of robots are controllable to accomplish a given task as a group. These two outstanding characteristics of “the necessity of two-way multipoint-to-multipoint wireless connection” and “the controllability of all robots' locations” are not common in conventional mobile ad hoc network (MANET) and ubiquitous sensor network (USN), so there must be a new networking scheme which is suited for the motion control of the swarm. In this paper, we discuss robots formation schemes for finding and networking other robots. We reveal that, starting from the initial stage where any robot has no wireless connection to other robots, a clustering scheme without any robots formation control finally results in full wireless connection among all robots with the shortest average walking distance thus the least energy consumption.