ROBO-FLOCK: Development of a low-cost Leader-follower Swarm of Mobile Robots

Abstract

This paper describes a low-cost design for flocking control of mobile robots. The robots are in Master-Slave configuration with full duplex communication mode. Two important factors included in the present research are the co-design of coordination and communication. To provide coordination between master and slave, a wireless communication network is built between the master and the slave units. For practical implementation of coordination between robots we selected two basic problems in mobile robotics. One of which is line following technique and second one is collision avoidance using swarm based control. Both techniques comprise of one master and one slave unit. The master robot acts as a controller for the slave unit in order to control all the position, orientation and speed of slave.