Emerging of Group Formation — Morphological Configuration of Multi-Robot System —

Abstract

This paper deals with computer simulation and hardware-robot experiment on emergence of global morphological structure in multi-robot system by taking the tasks of space-exploring, gathering to the original point and a circle formation. The most important aspect of the paper is the elemental robots, consisting of the system, to be equipped with simple mechanical and control functions and the system, composed of a large number of the elemental robots, to exhibit a global behavior through interactions among the elements and the environmental boundaries. The simple but basic actions of elemental robots are attraction and repulsion. Depending on those two actions to be taken from local information about their environments, the multi-robot system will have the possibility to emerge such global morphological structures. This paper concludes that a multi-robot system may be designed for given task environments, but the design methodology must be examined systematically.