Adaptive Group Formation in Multirobot Systems

Multirobot systems (MRSs) are capable of solving task complexity, increasing performance in terms of maximizing spatial/ temporal/radio coverage or minimizing mission completion time. They are also more reliable than single-robot systems as robustness is increased through redundancy. Many applications such as rescue, reconnaissance, and surveillance and communication relaying require the MRS to be able to self-organize the team members in a decentralized way. Group formation is one of the benchmark problems in MRS to study self-organization in these systems. This paper presents a hybrid approach to group formation problem in multi-robot systems. This approach combines the efficiency of the cellular automata as finite state machine, the interconnectivity of the virtual grid and its bonding technique, and last but not least the decentralization of the adaptive dynamic leadership.