Cooperative Navigation in Sparsely Populated Swarms

Abstract: The current state of the art techniques for robot swarm navigation use communication assisted local interactions to achieve a cooperative solution to the problem. While this solution provides optimum, near-shortest paths in swarms of considerable population, it fails to scale well with reduction in population. We propose a solution to this shortcoming by incorporating cardinality in the swarm and utilizing it to impose constraints on the robots ’ possible movements. We have tested our solution using time and population as parameters of performance. We compare the performance with existing communication assisted algorithm to accentuate the improvement in performance and outline possible future work in the area