Experimental Studies of Multi-robot Formation and Transforming

Focusing on multi-robot flocking, this paper develops a formation holding and transforming method by using the leader-follower strategy on the double or triple robot groups. With this method the state and role of each robot can be identified, and the most suitable topology of the multi-robot formation is decided in order to go through a gap or avoid an obstacle. Furthermore, the algorithms and strategies are implemented on the Koala Robots of SEIC/BAe systems, and the communication between each robot is based on the Internal Communication Engine (ICE), which is a popular middleware used for building distributed communication environments. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.