Collision avoiding decentralized sorting of robotic swarm

摘要

Sorting the swarm of robots is required when the robots are carrying different loads and they can not simply swap the loads. In 2016, Zhou et al. presented an interesting algorithm to sort a swarm of robots, wherein the authors made a main tree and a feedback tree to assign a topology to the robots, based on which the robots moved while arranging themselves in a sorted order. While the approach was very interesting and the results were critically analyzed by the authors, we see a critical problem that the approach did not account for collisions because of which the results can be very different. In this paper, we extend the work of Zhou et al. by enabling the robots to avoid collision by using a geometric approach called as “follow the gap” method. Together both the algorithms allow robot swarm to sort themselves in a straight line while avoiding collision simultaneously.