Probability of mixing up the nearest neighbor robot under target enclosure by robot swarm

• Main Authors: Masao Kubo, Hiroshi Sato, Akihiro Yamaguchi, Eugene Kitamura, Akira Namatame
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Atlantis Press 2015-11-01
• Series: Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life (JRNAL)
• Subjects: target enclosure; swarm robotics; low cost robot design; collective intelligence
• Online Access: https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/25844536.pdf

This paper analyzes conditions in which a robotic swarm with a simplest communication device can succeed to enclose a target. The robots have to know directions to their each nearest neighbors. Each robot has a same signal emitter like a torch and they can observe the sum of the intensity of their torches. We analyze the probability to the mistake of the direction when a robot adopts the direction of the strongest intensity of the signal as the direction of the nearest neighbor because we expect this approach makes the robot swarm more simple and scalable. The computer simulations show the case of the success.