Novel Method of Communication in Swarm Robotics Based on the NFC Technology

摘要

Swarm robotics has pulled the attention of scientists for its flexibility, redundancy, stability, emergent intelligence and many other features. One major issue in design of swarm robots is the communication system. In spite of existence of currently employed communication systems in swarm robots such as IR, Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc. still it has not been concluded which communication system is the best fit in swarm robotics. In this paper an alternative communication system based on the NFC technology is proposed and its advantages over other available systems are evaluated. In order to prove the concept, a simple food scavenging scenario is implemented using three robots which communicate together based on the NFC technology. At the end of this paper, it has been deduced that advantageous features of the NFC communication systems seem to satisfy the requirements of the swarms up to some extents.