Work on Swarm Robotics Presented at the ICoIAS

At the International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (ICoIAS), which took place at the renowned Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Vivienne Jia Zhong presented the results of her research on swarm robotics.

Search and target-surrounding present a use case important to military and rescue operation. In her work addressing this issue, Vivienne Jia Zhong developed a set of collective algorithms using Kilobots. To find and reach the target, the searchers performed various strategies: they dispersed and avoided collisions with other searchers in the search process. If they came across other searchers that were closer to the target, they orbited them. Finally, once the target was found, the searchers surrounded it.

These algorithms were tested in the simulator V-REP and on actual Kilobots. The results showed that the algorithms performed better in the simulation than in the actual implementation. The success rate of finding the target was much higher in the simulation. In particular, the Kilobots’ communication capability presented a challenge in the implementation. To find out more about the research, please refer to the full paper “Comparison of a Real Kilobot Robot Implementation With its Computer Simulation Focussing on Target-Searching Algorithms”.