Assembly of Configurations in a Networked Robotic System: A Case Study on a Reconfigurable Interactive Table Lamp

In the present study, we are interested in verifying how the progressive addition of constraints on communication and localization impact the performance of a swarm of small robots in shape formation tasks. Identified to be of importance in a swarm-user interaction context, the time required to construct a given spatial configuration is considered as a performance metric. The experimental work reported in this paper starts from global and synchronized localization information, shown to be successful both on a real hardware system and in simulation. In a second step, communication is constrained to a local scale, thus obliging a single designated robot to disseminate the global localization information to the other agents. The reliability of the radio communication channel and its impact upon the performance of the system are considered.