A distributed algorithm for robot formations using local sensing and limited range communications E. M. Saad, M. H. Awadalla, A. M. Hamdy, H. I. Ali Department of Electronics, Communications & Computer Engineering Faculty of Engineering, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt Abstract This paper focuses on the development of intelligent multi-agent robot teams that are capable of acting autonomously and of collaborating in a dynamic environment to achieve team objectives. Also it addresses the problem of achieving a global behavior by a group of simple and autonomous mobile robots. This behavior can be achieved by controlling the local interactions among the members of the robot teammates. A new vision based technique in the context of robot formation task is proposed. There is neither global information nor a predefined team leader available. Therefore, to get different robot formations, a distributed algorithm for robot controller is proposed. A simulated team of robots based on Webots simulator is constructed to validate the proposed approaches. Different robot formations’ experiments are conducted. Therefore, the results show that the robot teams were able to achieve their objectives despite dynamic changes in the environment and variations in the capabilities of the team members. Keywords: Local sensing, intelligent multi-agent robot teams, robot formations 1. Introduction This paper addresses the problem of achieving a global behavior by a group of mobile robots. This problem became of larger interest nowadays as a result of its various important applications. Mobile sensing networks, cooperative transportation and mine field exploration are some examples of tasks that can be assigned to a robot group. Robot formations comprise an essential part for most of these applications. The paper aim is to concentrate on developing an intelligent controller for robots having very simple design so that they could exhibit a complex global behavior. The robots are aimed to self organize themselves to take different geometric formations. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a review of related work. Section 3 illustrates the hardware platform for the robots. Section 4 presents the proposed intelligent controller. Section 5 describes the experimental work. Section 6 gives a discussion and conclusion. 2. Related work Various approaches have been proposed for the problem of emerging a global behavior for a group of robots [1, 2]. In [3], a group of simulated robots are used to perform some robot formations such as circles and simple polygons formations. In this work, robots have a global knowledge about the other robots’ positions. Each robot oriented itself to the furthest and nearest robot. In [4], a group of mobile robot motion was also considered. They used the