Cooperative Network Formation between Swarm Robots

Swarm robot technology could be used in future daily applications. It does not require a lot of manpower once it is deployed into the field compared to doing large scale tasks manually done by humans. However, the downside of using swarm robots is that when the number of agents grow the communication between the swarms will also gradually get more complicated. Besides that, when moving large number of agents in a swarm towards completing a specific task together will also be a challenge due to the monitoring of each swarm agent’s location. Lastly, the swarms should be able to reestablish their location with the large swarms if it ever gets lost from the pack. In order to overcome these problems, engineers have been exploring various ways of making robots work together and communicate with each other with different methods and tools. For this project, it will focus more on the type of wireless communication used, ranging from short range Bluetooth to long range Wi-Fi. With the wireless communication established, the swarms should be able to perform multi-hop communication with each agents through different network topologies. Finally, the swarm robots requires a cooperative algorithm in order for it to adapt to various situation in the different environments. When each agent is deployed into outdoor environments, it will have to adapt to the surroundings while maintaining a certain predetermined flight formation and constant communication with each agent and the base station

Social Graphs and Their Applications to Robotics

In this thesis, we propose a new method to design a roadmap-based path planning algorithm in a 2D static environment, which assumes a-priori knowledge of robots’ positions, their goals’ positions, and surrounding obstacles. The new algorithm, called Multi-Robot Path Planning Algorithm (MRPPA), combines Visibility graph VG method with the algebraic connectivity