DEVLOG 6 - CONTROL

With the final addition of UI and controls, the simulation is now complete. While I could continue to add more detail and more realism, I think this is more than enough for what I set out to do.

If you don’t know, I’ve been working on a simulation of a decentralised robot swarm that I plan to build soon. My goal was to recreate every relevant aspect of the real life robots, so I could explore how they would behave in different scenarios. It also allowed me to plan out how the robots are going to communicate in the real world.

Changes

UI

The major addition of this update was the UI. You can now configure different aspects of the simulation to test the robots. Specifically the IR range, the noisiness of IR and UWB, the precision of the motors, the amount of IR receivers and emitters and of course the size of the swarm. As well as settings, you can now send formation commands to the swarm to dynamically change their formation. I also added a new REMOTE state that lets you select a robot and control it directly. Finally, you can toggle on and off different visual elements.

Walls

The addition of walls was the final piece to test my communication system. As I said in the last devlog, I designed it to accommodate for robots not always being able to see each other. Now, with the ability to block lines of sight, I can finally test it.

Communication

While messing with the controls I discovered a lot of oversights with the communication. One example is I was only establishing the network once when a new robot joined. This meant that even if the robots moved, they would still read from the old distance values when the formation changed, causing them to choose inefficient paths and in some cases get tangled or stuck. I fixed this by making them reestablish the network whenever the formation is changed.

Findings

To be completely honest, I didn’t discover that much that I didn’t already know. One thing that stood out was that the IR noise didn’t affect the formations as much as I thought it would. Outside of a few erratic movements, they remain fairly stable. The UWB noise had a much larger effect, as UWB is used to determine distance. The formations also hold with both sliders up to max which was reassuring.