Self-Healing Distributed Swarm Formation Control Using Image Moments

Abstract--Human-swarm interaction is facilitated by a lowdimensional encoding of the swarm formation, independent of the (possibly large) number of robots. We propose using image moments to encode two-dimensional formations of robots. Each robot knows the desired formation moments, and simultaneously estimates the current moments of the entire swarm while controlling its motion to better achieve the desired group moments. The estimator is a distributed optimization, requiring no centralized processing, and self-healing, meaning that the process is robust to initialization errors, packet drops, and robots being added to or removed from the swarm. In applications such as environmental monitoring and search and rescue, humans may need to control This allows us to take advantage of image moment representations the swarm formation in real time [4].