Development and Assessment of an Experimental System for Swarm Formation by Underwater Robots

To examine swarm formation, we developed a system comprising a set of robots, a position acquisition system, a visible light communication device, and a PC to obtain the position and orientation of the respective robot and to determine their motion. Using it, experiments were conducted on the ground and underwater. Results of the experiments show that the system can make the robots form a predefined formation on the ground. They can move two underwater robots to target points. Results show that the system is useful to develop and to verify swarm algorithms in a realistic situation, not merely in a computer simulation.