Control of a leader-follower mobile robotic swarm based on the NXT educational LEGO platform

This article presents the design and implementation of a control scheme for a leader-follower mobile robotic swarm, based on the NXT educational Lego platform. The utilized control scheme is applied in all the members of the swarm and is based on an error dynamics controller, which is responsible for controlling the trajectory of each robot. The utilized robots are non-holonomic vehicles that have been constructed based on the Lego Mindstorm NXT educational kits, while the robots are controlled remotely from a base station through wireless data links over multiple bluetooth channels. Experimental results which prove the efficiency of the proposed scheme are presented.