Control of a Mobile Robot Swarm via Informed Robots

In this paper, we study how and to what extent a self-organized mobile robot flock can be guided to move in a desired direction by informing some of the individuals within the flock. Specifically, we extend a flocking behavior that was shown to maneuver a swarm of mobile robots as a cohesive group in free space, avoiding obstacles. In its original form, the flock does not have a preferred direction and would wander aimlessly. In this study, we extend this behavior by “informing” some of the individuals about the desired direction that we wish the swarm to move. The informed robots do not signal that they are “informed” (a.k.a. unacknowledged leadership) and instead guide the swarm by their tendency to move in the desired direction. Through experimental results with physical and simulated robots we show that the self-organized flocking of a robot swarm can be effectively guided by an informed minority. We use two metrics to measure the accuracy of the flock direction, and the ability to stay cohesive. We show that the accuracy of guidance increases with 1)the flock size, 2)the “stubbornness” of the informed individuals to align with the desired direction, and 3)the ratio of the informed individuals.