Inspiration
For the swarm lab, our group will be attempting to recreate the concept of “group-defensive behavior”, where members of a pack will actively fend off non-members from entering a defined territory. In this case, the bots will represent the group members, and the goal will be to program them so that they push any foreign object out of a set square boundary as a swarm.
Process
We each set specific roles for the members, which is as follows:
- Bot Orientation and Angle/Boundary Distance calculation (Anand)
- Real-Time Movement (Gabi)
- Updating/Sending Data (Kevin)
- Reset Bot Position (Diana)
Goal
Our hope is that the bots will react accordingly to the presence of a foreign object:
- Object is detected within boundary
- Robot with the shortest distance to the object will move first to “attack” it
- The robot will navigate to the object and attempt to push it out the boundary
- If the robot is unable to do so (most likely if the object is too heavy), the rest of the bots will navigate to the object as well, forming a chain sequence behind the first bot to help push the object out
- Once the object is pushed out, the bots will resume original reset positions