Towards Cooperation in a Heterogeneous Robot Swarm through Spatially Targeted Communication

In this work, we study cooperation in a heterogeneous swarm robotic system composed of wheeled and aerial robots. The wheeled robots are able to physically connect to one another autonomously and thus form collective robotic entities. The aerial robots have a privileged overview of the environment since they can fly and attach to metal ceilings. We present a system that enables spatially targeted communication. Our system enables aerial robots to establish dedicated communication links with individual wheeled robots or with selected groups of wheeled robots based on their position in the environment. The heterogeneous swarm robotic hardware is currently under development. We therefore demonstrate the proposed approach on an existing multirobot system consisting of only wheeled robots by letting one of the wheeled robots assume the role of an aerial robot. We then go on to show how such a spatially targeted communication link can be used to enable cooperation in the heterogeneous swarm robotic system considered in this work. That is, we show how the aerial robots can communicate with selected groups of wheeled robots and instruct them on how to overcome obstacles in their path by forming morphologies appropriate to the obstacle encountered. We conduct experiments in simulation to quantify separately the benefits of cooperation and of spatially targeted communication. Our approach does not require any form of global information and relies solely on a situated communication modality based on LEDs and camera.