Shape Reconfiguration and Path Planning of Microswarms for Automatic Collision Avoidance

Reconfigurable microrobotic swarms have drawn extensive attention recently. The combination of shape reconfiguration and path planning of microrobotic swarms for collision avoidance is an important task that still remains unsolved. In this work, we firstly propose a shape reconfiguration planning method to realize the automatic shape transformation of a swarm between circular and elliptical shapes. Subsequently, different path planning methods are developed for the vortex-like swarm and the elliptical swarm, respectively. A shape controller is then proposed to control the aspect ratio of the elliptical swarm. The motion controller and the shape controller are integrated to enable the simultaneous control of the swarm morphology and locomotion. Using the proposed strategy, the swarm is capable of avoiding collisions and reaching the predefined target in a micromaze, and the experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed strategy.