Multi-Robot Formation Control via a Real-Time Drawing Interface

This paper describes a system that takes real-time user input to direct a robot swarm. The user interface is via drawing, and the user can create a single drawing or an animation to be represented by robots. For example, the drawn input could be a stick figure, with the robots automatically adopting a physical configuration to represent the figure. Or the input could be an animation of a walking stick figure, with the robots moving to represent the dynamic deforming figure. Each robot has a controllable RGB LED so that the swarm can represent color drawings. The computation of robot position, robot motion, and robot color is automatic, including scaling to the available number of robots. The work is in the field of entertainment robotics for play and making robot art, motivated by the fact that a swarm of mobile robots is now affordable as a consumer product. The technical contribution of the paper is three-fold. Firstly the paper presents shaped flocking, a novel algorithm to control multiple robots—this extends existing flocking methods so that robot behavior is driven by both flocking forces and forces arising from a target shape. Secondly the new work is compared with an alternative approach from the existing literature, and the experimental results include a comparative analysis of both algorithms with metrics to compare performance. Thirdly, the paper describes a working real-time system with results for a physical swarm of 60 differential-drive robots.