A Swarm Engineering Approach to Mobile Sensor Network Design towards Collaborative Phototaxis with a Slowly Moving Light

Swarm robotics is an innovative approach to the control and coordination of a large number of multi-agent systems that use naturally inspired swarm intelligent methods to perform a task through emergent behaviors. A swarm based approach can decrease the complexity and the cost of designing a cooperative multi-robot system. This paper proposes a general engineering approach to develop a robotic swarm that focuses on how to synthesize an emergent behavior and the associated inputs to this end. We validate our methodology by engineering a swarm to simultaneously rendezvous on a stationary light source. Furthermore, we also considered the case when the light source is slowly moving. The design is simulated in NetLogo, an agent-based modeling software, and implemented on the MASnet robot platform. This work demonstrates the basic knowledge and tools required to engineer a robotic swarm.