Color-Coded Light Signals Based Communication for Swarming Behaviors in Mobile Robotic System

Swarm robotics deals with the design, development, and control of multirobot system. The individual agents of the swarm robotics system are simple, with limited capabilities in order to enhance easy scalability of the system. The current researches in swarm robotics are limited due to the complexity of their control and communication system. This paper presents minimobile robots that uses color-coded light signals for communication over short distances and can also communicate over WiFi mesh for global information sharing. Color-coded light-based communication enables the robots to control the directionality and range of communication signals, thus making the communication highly efficient comparing to other conventional communication techniques. The proposed robot design helps the agents to communicate with each other and thereby a swarming behavior emerges from their interaction.