Decentralized Flocking Algorithms for a Swarm of Mobile Robots: Problem, Current Research and Future Directions

Recently, control and coordination of a set of autonomous mobile robots has been paid a lot of attentions, because the cooperation of simple robots offers several advantages, such as redundancy and flexibility, and allows performing hard tasks that could be impossible for one single robot. There are a lot of interesting applications of multiple robots, such as satellite exploration and surveillance missions. So far, there are many papers working on the coordination of mobile robots. The characteristic of simplicity of mobile robots brings potential wide applications; however this characteristic also lead to crash with higher probability during cooperation, especially in harsh environment. Surprisingly, only few researches consider the fault tolerance of mobile robots, especially for dynamic coordination application - robot flocking. In this paper, we summarize the existed flocking algorithms and discuss their characteristics. Then we briefly described our fault tolerant flocking algorithms in different models. Finally we proposed the potential future research directions for dynamic flocking of a group of mobile robots. In all, this work can provide a good reference for the researchers working on dynamic cooperation of agents in distributed system.