Home

Welcome to project_polygon!

In a month and a half, we created a robotic swarm in which each individual agent moves to represent the vertex of a regular polygon whose number of sides equals the number of swarm agents.

TODO: IMAGE OF OBJECTIVE

VIDEO: NEATOS FORM POLYGON VERTICES

In this project, our final for the course Computational Robotics, we explored swarming behavior and built upon prior knowledge to delve more into localization and the ROS framework. Here were a couple of swarming behavior inspirations: example 1, example 2.

Our swarm agents were modified Neato robots outfitted with Raspberry Pis and cameras.

Process overview

1. Summary of steps we took:
2. Figure out ways to connect to multiple robots, subscribe, and publish to multiple robots.
3. Research algorithm/paper and found a paper by Lorenzo Sabattini, Cristian Secchi, and Cesare Fantuzzi: Arbitrarily shaped formations of mobile robots: artificial potential fields and coordinate transformation. The paper perfectly aligns with our goal: forming polygon with robots.
4. With the helpful equations from the paper, we create simulation using matplotlib. Although this simulation is not exactly the same as in the real world, it was helpful in debugging.
5. Figured out how to translate robots from point A to point B.
6. Simulate polygon formation behavior in Gazebo.
7. In Gazebo, we were able to figure out how to connect to multiple robots and moving robot from point A to point B.
8. Modify Ar_Pose to localize robots in common reference frame with AR markers.
9. Tune parameters.

Try with real robot in world frame and tune parameter