Abstract
Aggregation is a vital behavior when performing complex tasks in most of the swarm systems, such as swarm robotics systems. In this paper, three new aggregation methods, namely the distance-angular, the distance-cosine, and the distance-Minkowski \mathit {k} -nearest neighbor ( \mathit {k} -NN) have been introduced. These aggregation methods are mainly built on well-known metrics: the cosine, angular, and Minkowski distance functions, which are used here to compute distances among robots' neighbors. Relying on these methods, each robot identifies its \mathit {k} -nearest neighborhood set that will interact with. Then, in order to achieve the aggregation, the interactions sensing capabilities among the set members are modeled using a virtual viscoelastic mesh. Analysis of the results obtained from the ARGoS simulator shows a significant improvement in the swarm aggregation performance compared to the conventional distance-weighted \mathit {k} -NN aggregation method. Also, the aggregation performance of the methods is reported to be robust to partially faulty robots and accurate under noisy sensors.