General Coating of Arbitrary Objects Using Robot Swarms

Abstract

(Nano) robot swarms promise new applications in the field of health and entertainment. One of the tasks such a swarm could solve is coating, in which the robots in the swarm locate themselves as close to an object of arbitrary shape as possible. In this paper, we present a swarm coating algorithm for simple robots using only local communication and decentralized coordination only. The robots calculate distances to the coating target object for themselves and all adjacent spaces around them, trying then to move to a lower distance than they are currently at. Through simulations, we show that our approach is able to efficiently coat various object forms with a 100% success rate, even objects with cave-like structures are coated correctly.