1. Control of Swarm Robotic Systems for Coverage and Manipulation Tasks
Spring Berman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Autonomous Collective Systems Laboratory
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

2. Example Application for Robotic Swarms

3. Control Strategies for Swarms
Infeasible to plan, monitor actions of each of 1000’s of robots
Need approach to designing controllers for robotic swarms:
Scalable with robot population size
Local sensing, local or no inter-robot communication
Provably produces a target collective behavior
Easily adaptable to changes in target behavior and disturbances

4. Methodology Macroscopic model Rigorous abstraction Microscopic model
Analysis:
Establish theoretical guarantees on performance
Control synthesis:
Design tunable parameters of macroscopic model
Macroscopic model
Equations governing concentrations of swarm subpopulations
Broadcast parameters
Rigorous abstraction
Decentralized robot control policies of motion and stochastic task switching that produce desired collective behavior
Microscopic model
Typical robot simulation