Decentralized State Transition for a Swarm with External Sensors by Local Interactions

Abstract

In this study, we proposed an automatic state transition algorithm through two types of interactions for a swarm that reflects sensor inputs. Each agent in a swarm is equipped with a phase oscillator whose angular velocity contains sensor input information. In the proposed algorithm, a swarm estimates the unified leader robot that has the maximum sensory input through a conventional local interaction. In addition, the candidate leader robots are always communicated to the whole swarm by a broadcast-type interaction we newly introduced. As a result, the swarm can make a distributed and simultaneous transition to the next state after a unified leader is determined. In the implementation, we verified the proposed method by introducing light as a local interaction and sound wave as a broadcast interaction to distinguish the agent with maximum input and switch state automatically.