RiverSwarm: Topology-Aware Distributed Planning for Obstacle Encirclement in Connected Robotic Swarms

Distributed motion control of robotic swarms has been receiving increased attention due to their potential for application in many domains including emergency response and remote sensing and exploration. A challenging aspect of motion control for swarms is enabling them to move past large obstacles without losing global connectivity. In this paper we present a novel motion primitive for swarms of robots which allows them to flow past large obstacles while remaining connected. This technique relies on a key result from differential geometry, the GaussBonnet theorem, which allows tracking and counting the number of holes in a given triangulated graph in a distributed manner.