A Regular Tetrahedron Formation Strategy for Swarm Robots in Three-Dimensional Environment

A decentralized control method, namely Regular Tetrahedron Formation (RTF), is presented for a swarm of simple robots operating in three-dimensional space. It is based on virtual spring mechanism and enables four neighboring robots to autonomously form a Regular Tetrahedron (RI) regardless of their initial positions. RTF method is applied to various sizes of swarms through a dynamic neighbor selection procedure. Each robot's behavior depends only on position of three dynamically selected neighbors. An obstacle avoidance model is also introduced. Final, algorithm is studied with computational experiments which demonstrated that it is effective.