Penguin Huddling-inspired Energy Sharing and Formation Movement in Multi-robot Systems

Robot survivability in long term autonomous search and rescue, surveillance, monitoring operations to remote locations with minimal to no human supervision is of great importance. In such applications, a convoy of heterogeneous mobile robots in formation traveling from point A to point B on a mission, suffers from its range being constrained by the highest battery using agent. In this paper, an Emperor penguin-huddling inspired gradient based energy sharing and position shuffling scheme is proposed for heterogeneous multi-robot systems on the move, with the purpose of extending the working life of the entire convoy together. Each robot is modeled based on an Emperor penguin with carefully placed inductive coils for energy sharing with neighbors. The multi-robot system is built following the tightly packed hexagonal lattice formation for optimal charge sharing and a position coordination algorithm is proposed to allow all agents an equal opportunity to move to the center in turns which is shown to be the most advantageous position in the convoy. The convergence of the position shuffling algorithm is analyzed to show that the convoy formation is maintained over time. Simulation results validate that convoys, regardless of size, can survive and travel much further together with the proposed Emperor penguin huddling-inspired shuffling and energy sharing methods than individuals relying only on themselves.