1Cooperative navigation in robotic swarms

Abstract—We present a cooperative navigation algorithm for robotic swarms. Its purpose is to let a robot find a given target robot, while being guided by the other robots of the swarm. The system is based on wireless communication: the robots forward messages containing navigation information over the ad hoc network among them, and the searching robot uses this information to find its target. We study the algorithm in two different scenarios. In the first scenario, a single searching robot needs to find a single target, while all other robots are involved in tasks of their own. We show that the communication based navigation system allows the robots of the swarm to guide the searching robot without the need to adapt their own movements. In the second scenario, we study collective navigation: all robots of the swarm need to navigate back and forth between two targets. We show that in this case, the proposed navigation algorithm gives rise to synergies in robot navigation, and lets the swarm self-organize into a robust dynamic structure. This self-organization improves navigation efficiency, and lets the swarm find shortest paths in cluttered environments. We test our system both in simulation and on real robots. I