Distributed Formation Planning for Robot Swarms

Aalok Patwardhan

Keywords: Multirobot, swarm, planning, pathfinding, distributed

TL;DR: An outline of demos to be shown on the topic of distributed multirobot formation planning for a swarm of robots

Abstract: A swarm of robots is often required to create formations in space whilst avoiding obstacles in the environment. In order to do so a high degree of coordination is required between the robots to ensure smooth and safe paths. We formulate formation planning as performing inference on a factor graph using Gaussian Belief Propagation (GBP). This work is an outline of the real time and interactive demos we would like to show at the Distributed Graphs Workshop at ICRA 2023. We show some examples of the demos that will be displayed, and hope that this work encourages more research in this field.