A Novel Color-Coded Light-Based Communication for Autonomous Swarm Robotics Research

Abstract

Swarm robotics is one of the emerging domains of robotics, with its wide areas of application it is gaining a vital role in the modern society; thus, further researches in this domain is ever increasing around the world, while many swarm robots utilize optical mode of communication for local interactions which generally consist of modulated infrared signals. The influence of such communication on the performance of the swarm is still poorly understood. The current paper proposes a novel communication technique based on color-coded light signals which can be used for swarm robot system. By utilizing the colored light signals, the activity of the individual agent or a group of agents of the swarm can be easily monitored and thus their impact on the emergent behavior of the complete system can be studied.