Collective Transport of Robots: Emergent Flocking from Minimalist Multi-robot Leader-following

We study the collective transport of robots (CTR) problem. A large number of commodity mobile robots are to be moved from one location to another by a single operator. Joysticking each one or carrying them physically is impractical. None of the robots are particularly sophisticated in their ability to plan or reason. Prior work on flocking and formation control has addressed the transport of a robot group that maintains its integrity by explicitly controlling coherence. We show how flocking emerges as a consequence of each robot contending for space near the human operator. A coherent emergent flock can be made to follow a leader in this manner thereby solving the CTR problem. We also present the design of a handworn IMU-based gesture interface which allows the human operator to issue simple commands to the group. A preliminary experimental evaluation of the system shows robust CTR with different leader behaviors.