Using the Khepera III research robot from K-Team Mobile Robotics, Edward Macdonald from the Georgia Institute of Technology developed his Master's thesis on independent thinking robots that can collaborate between each other. Using no communication between the robots, only the position of each robot is known. An overhead camera system tracks each bot and broadcasts their position to each other via wifi. Each robot does not know what position it will start, where it will be, or any other prior data. When a command is sent, or a bot moves out of position, they react to their surroundings and make the minimum number of movements to fulfill or maintain the request. This is most apparent when a bot is taken out of formation, the closest to the gap fills it in.
Khepera bots have need used for quite some time in formation control. The Robotics Group of DAEIMI, Laboratory of Industrial Automation, University of Cassino, Italy demonstrated how the Khepera II bots could be used to avoid obstacles while performing a formation. The team at Cassino has since continued working on cooperative robotics with the idea that several bots working together can perform more work than a single. Read more about their individual projects on their site.
Eavesdropper