Assembling a Swarm Navigation System: Communication, Localization, Sensing and Control

Autonomous robotic swarms have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to their enormous, principally unlimited, capability expansion from single robot systems. A communication system, as the `glue' in a swarm, plays an essential role that goes beyond conventional data exchange into localization, sensing, control, etc. Each building block of a swarm can be rooted from specific well-addressed research topic such as communications, signal processing, robotics, control, etc. However, an interdisciplinary view on swarm communication system, specially its impacts on other sub-systems, is still missing. In this paper, we share our experience in the assembling of a radio-based swarm system, from module design to system integration, from theoretical investigation to experimental platform development. With that we aim to shed light on some essential issues when designing a communication system particularly suitable for swarms.