Simulation of the Collective Behavior of a Miniature Robot Swarm

Abstract

we developed a two-dimensional model to simulate the collective behavior of a miniature robot swarm. The model incorporates size, mass, and other experimental characteristics. It represents the robots as discrete bodies that interact through an effective potential as the interaction of sensors and emitters with a microcontroller. Each robot generates heat and moves along the gradient of the global temperature field, calculated using the 2D heat conduction equation. We present numerical simulations for interactions ranging from a few robots to swarms of up to 500 robots. The software simulates various self-organization and collective behavior mechanisms, including the self-assembly of robot swarms. To optimize runtime, we implemented the Nvidia CUDA parallel computing architecture. We used gnuplot for visualization of the results.