On the Fluidic Collision Avoidance of Swarm Robots via Distributed Computation of the MPS Method

Abstract

This paper proposes a control method for swarm robots to avoid collisions via fluid dynamics. MPS (Moving Particle Semi-implicit) method, which is a type of particle method, is used to reflect fluid dynamics to swarm robots. To adapt the MPS method to swarm robots, we consider distributed calculation of the MPS method. Specifically, the simultaneous equations for pressure calculation in the MPS method are solved by DCG (Distributed Conjugate Gradient) method. Since the DCG method is a distributed iterative solution method, the trade-off between computational complexity and communication traffi is important. We cluster swarm robots to reduce the total communication traffic, taking into account the relationship between distributed calculation and communication traffic. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of fluid collision avoidance against various shaped obstacles.