United We Move: Decentralized Segregated Robotic Swarm Navigation

A robotic swarm is a particular type of multi-robot system that employs a large number of simple agents in order to cooperatively perform different types of tasks. In this context, a topic that has received much attention in recent years is the concept of segregation. This concept is important, for example, in tasks that require maintaining robots with similar features or objectives arranged in cohesive groups, while robots with different characteristics remain separated on their own groups. In this paper we propose a decentralized methodology to navigate heterogeneous groups of robots whilst maintaining segregation among different groups. Our approach consists of extending the ORCA algorithm with a modified version of the classical flocking behaviors to keep robots segregated. A series of simulations and real experiments show that the groups were able to navigate in a cohesive fash-ion in all evaluated scenarios. Furthermore, the methodology allowed for a faster convergence of the group to the goal when compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.