Robot swarming over the Internet

We consider cooperative control of robots involving two different testbed systems in remote locations in different time zones, with communication on the internet. The goal is to have all robots properly follow a leader defined on one of the testbeds, while maintaining non-overlapping positions within each swarm and between swarms, assuming they are superimposed in the same virtual space. A dual-testbed design is developed involving real robots and remote network communication, performing a cooperative swarming algorithm based on a modified Morse Potential. Extensive experimental results were obtained with real internet communication and virtual testbeds running in each lab. The communication protocol was designed to minimize loss of packets, and average transfer delays are within tolerance limits for practical applications. We ran several experiments, with intentional packet loss, that illustrate the degradation of the results in the case of modest and severe packet loss. The novelty of this work is its experimental aspect involving long range network communication across a large distance via the internet. The work raises a series of interesting theoretical problems.