A scalable distributed algorithm for shape transformation in multi-robot systems

Ramprasad Ravichandran, Geoffrey J. Gordon, Seth Copen Goldstein

Abstract: Distributed reconfiguration is an important problem in multi-robot systems such as mobile sensor nets and metamorphic robot systems. In this work, we present a scalable distributed reconfiguration algorithm, hierarchical median decomposition, to achieve arbitrary target configurations. Our algorithm is built on top of a novel distributed median consensus estimator. The algorithms presented are fully distributed and do not require global communication. We show results from simulations in an open source multi-robot simulator.