Edinburgh Napier University

  Swarm robotics coordinates multiple interacting robots for which it takes inspiration from nature. It has been used in different engineering applications, such as: food searching, path planning, and communication between robots. Additionally, when robots are used to explore unknown areas this can safeguard humans from having to take unnecessary risks. Most existing exploration strategies aim to reduce the exploration time as well as the robot?s power consumption. However, during the exploration process, the robots tend to preserve their formation which could, depending on the area to be explored, be inefficient. Therefore, this paper proposes to dynamically change the swarm?s formation as information about the explored area is being obtained. The restructuring obviously aims to reduce overall time and power consumption and considers any obstacles faced and/or the area itself. Overall, this means that the robots, as a swarm, will need to be more coordinated, as well as prepared for challenges that relate to e.g. the distribution of decision making across the swarm.