Adaptive Shape Reconfiguration of a Decentralized Motile System Exploiting Molecular Dynamics and Stokesian Dynamics Methods

Abstract

This paper discusses a fully decentralized algorithm able to create a coherent swarm of autonomous mobile robots from the viewpoint of computational physics. To this end, we focus on Molecular Dynamics and Stokesian Dynamics, both of which are widely used to investigate many-body systems. To verify the feasibility of our approach, this idea has been implemented to a swarm of 2-D radio-connected autonomous mobile robots as a practical example. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm can control the shape of the swarm appropriately based on the current situation without losing the coherence of the swarm nor exchanging global information among modules. Furthermore, we found that local interaction used to exploit Stokesian Dynamics plays an essential role to maintain the coherence of the swarm particularly in an unstructured environment.