Multi-Agent Control for Autonomous, Real-time and Choreographic Image Display

Abstract

This thesis presents a new way of looking at images and videos, Display Swarm, which is a novel robot display providing new types of visual experience. This work is focused on creating a multi-agent control method for real-time, autonomous and choreographic image display, where each pixel of an image is a mobile robot. This robot display consists of a large number of small autonomous agents, each one representing a pixel of the image, and aims at the generation of aesthetic effects that are impossible with a traditional display, such as, choreographic motion, image display and, finally video display. Moreover, this novel display is envisaged to allow human-computer interaction, where guests of a Theme Park might be able to control the movement of the group of robots. Imagine for example the case of a guest drawing a figure and the robots representing it, or, even more challenging, having them interactively represent a human face. Therefore this thesis presents a novel approach in the field of multi-agent pattern formation, linking it to the entertainment industry, an unexplored connection with a huge potential. Results of this work are general in the field of multi-agent pattern formation and might be applied to other applications. Moreover, formal results of this work are not limited to multi-agent pattern formation and image display, two main formal extensions of existing methods are also presented. First, an extension of Voronoi coverage for complex patterns; and second a novel local collision avoidance for large groups of non-holonomic agents.