Parallel Formation of Differently Sized Groups in a Robotic Swarm (特集 スワーム : 群れの創発的挙動生成)

tasks. Imagine a swarm of robots that must be deployed to monitor the spread of an environmental hazard. Different hazard areas of various sizes will need correspondingly sized groups of robots, and the hazard sites may be spread far apart. As in any such real-world scenario, it is likely that there will not be enough robots to allocate the ideal number to each hazard site. In this paper, we propose a distributed mechanism to solve this type of group formation problem, whereby large numbers of robots must be divided into multiple groups in parallel. When the number of available robots is sufficient, our system is capable of forming groups of different, pre-defined sizes. When the available robots are less than the sum of the desired sizes, our system distributes robots fairly across groups, ensuring that each group grows at the same rate. Existing approaches to parallel group formation in multi-robot systems have limitations that render them inappropriate for this type of scenario. Decentralised task allocation and task partitioning approaches scale well, but they only work when the tasks are located close to each other and the density of robots is sufficiently high 7)