Distributed Control and Emerging Behaviour in a Microrobot Team

In this work, we show the implementation and experimental evaluation of a distributed control system using a team of Elisa-3 mobile microrobots. The study focuses on the emergence of collective behaviors through local interactions. The proposed control law integrates obstacle avoidance, mutual alignment, and motion coordination. Different type of experiments were conducted in order to first calibrate the robots, then perform the alignment, and ensure the formation control. Our preliminary results show that microrobots can self-organize, achieve alignment, and move as a cohesive group by using only local information. The integration of obstacle avoidance enhances safety but introduces trade-offs with alignment stability due to continuous trajectory corrections. Experimental results highlight how hardware non-idealities, communication range limitations, and mechanical tolerances can affect the stability of collective motion. However, the system demonstrates robust self-organization capabilities and the ability to recover coordinated behavior even if a temporary loss of communication occurs. The findings contribute to the understanding of decentralized coordination strategies for swarm robotics and provide a practical framework for future studies on scalable multi-robot systems.