Recently, robotics research has been gained a lot of attentions, due to its wide applications, especially in some places that human beings cannot survive, like in a planet or fire. Flocking, as one of important applications of coordination of multiple robots, has a lot of applications. Our research goal is to achieve the effective coordinated flocking even with the crash of mobile robots. First, we proposed a fault tolerant flocking in an asynchronous model. Our algorithm ensures that the crash of faulty robots does not bring the formation to a permanent stop, and that the correct robots are thus eventually allowed to reorganize and continue moving together. We further design a new method by allowing the formation to move to any direction, including rotation, yet in a semi-synchronous model. We analyze the self-stabilization of our fault tolerant flocking algorithms when the memory of robots may corrupt. Finally, we propose a non-fault tolerant flocking algorithm in order to compare the performance with the above fault-tolerant ones. The described algorithm can effectively adapt to the environment to avoid the collision among robots and obstacles.

Dr. Yan Yang obtained her Ph.D degree in Information Science from Japan Advanced Science and Technology in March 2009 and her master degree in Computer Science from Central China Normal University in June 2005, respectively. Her research interests include network communication, fault tolerant distsributed computing and cooperation of mobile robots.