We present a novel method for guiding a large-scale swarm of autonomous
agents into a desired formation shape in a distributed and scalable manner. Our
Probabilistic Swarm Guidance using Inhomogeneous Markov Chains (PSG-IMC)
algorithm adopts an Eulerian framework, where the physical space is partitioned
into bins and the swarm's density distribution over each bin is controlled.
Each agent determines its bin transition probabilities using a
time-inhomogeneous Markov chain. These time-varying Markov matrices are
constructed by each agent in real-time using the feedback from the current
swarm distribution, which is estimated in a distributed manner. The PSG-IMC
algorithm minimizes the expected cost of the transitions per time instant,
required to achieve and maintain the desired formation shape, even when agents
are added to or removed from the swarm. The algorithm scales well with a large
number of agents and complex formation shapes, and can also be adapted for area
exploration applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed
swarm guidance algorithm by using results of numerical simulations and hardware
experiments with multiple quadrotors.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotic
