Swarm robots are making waves at the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab (GRITS). The small Khepera robots have been seen to do a number of amazing activities in the past including flying in perfect formation, playing ping pong and creating a tune on a piano. Now in the lab they can do something completely new.
Robot Landing Platform Formation
The automated robots group together on the ground to offer the ‘quadrotor helicopter’ a place to land by creating a mobile landing platform.
Ted Macdonald, the man behind this research did his graduate work at the GRITS lab, Georgia Tech. His thesis worked on the problems with multi-robot cooperation. The Kepera robots are asked to follow a leader robot and then they assemble into different formations. The algorithms do not need the robots to communicate but they do require the robots to know the position of their fellow bots.
What Macdonald wanted to do was to develop an algorithm that would enable the robots to work without preset locations and overcome the fundamental problems of multi-robot cooperation. His algorithm bases itself on the robots knowing the assigned formation and the relative location of other robots in the formation. Now each robot is able to autonomously determine where to go individually. They are also able to recalculate their route should there be any disturbances along the way.
As per Macdonald’s website, … “the goal is to have a group of mobile robots efficiently move into a predefined formation pattern, without knowing in advance which robot is assigned to which formation point. Furthermore, the robots do not know where the formation should take place and with what rotation. For my Master’s thesis, I developed an algorithm that can be executed by each robot that will achieve this goal.”