Collaboration in swarm robotics: A visual communication approach

Swarm robotics involves a number of simple robots that have a common task and carry it out in a collective way. In this context the collaboration among the different components is a crucial aspect, but not always it can be enacted in a direct way, i.e., by means of direct communication between components. This is because of the simplicity of the robots, but this turns out to increase robustness and flexibility of the swarm systems. In this paper we present a case study in which some robots are in charge of sweeping the perimeter of an area, and propose a distributed algorithm for the task division. We have tested the proposed algorithm in different situations; we report the results and we also compare them to the ones achieved with no collaboration.