DEVLOG 2 - SENSORS

Ok this is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Today I added IR transmitters and receivers to my robot swarm simulation, to bring it closer to reality. Now the robots only receive signals they can actually see, and compare the signal strengths across the receivers to get the direction of the source.

This is great, but now I have a big problem. With line-of-sight added, it’s possible for a robot not to be able to see the whole swarm. This means if they try to form a line, they can’t agree on how to do it.

Negotiation

To solve this, the robots need to distribute information throughout the swarm and agree on a formation, in a process called negotiation. There are a few ways to do this with varying levels of complexity, and I’m still doing research, so I won’t go into detail in this devlog. Whatever method I choose, I need to make sure it will work in real life with imperfect signals, and it can adapt to the swarm losing members.

Notes

I haven’t changed too much since the last devlog, but I felt like I should post this as context so the next one isn’t super long. AI Declaration: I used AI to help with implementing the emitters/receivers (occlusion, field of view, some helper functions etc.)

RED = Emitter
BLUE = Receiver