Analysis of local communication load in shape formation of a distributed morphogenetic swarm robotic system

Morphogenesis is the biological process that governs self-organized spatial pattern formation of cells during the embryonic development of multi-cellular organisms. Inspired by this process, we have proposed a morphogenetic framework for pattern formation and boundary coverage in a distributed swarm robotic system. The framework is based only on local communications among robots and will set up a local coordinate system. This paper focuses on the theoretical and empirical analysis of the framework regarding two aspects, namely, local communication load among the robots, and system performance such as system convergence time and average travel distance of robots for several pattern formation tasks. Results show that the proposed framework is efficient and scalable for self-organizing distributed swarm robotic systems with reasonable local communication load among robots.