The task of shape formation in robot swarms can often be reduced to two tasks—assigning goal locations to each robot and creating a collision-free path to that goal. In this article, we present a distributed algorithm that solves these tasks concurrently, enabling a swarm of robots to move and form a shape quickly and without collision. A user can specify a desired shape as an image, send that to a swarm of identically programmed robots, and the swarm will move all robots to goal locations within the desire
Source: Shape Formation in Homogeneous Swarms Using Local Task Swapping – IEEE Journals & Magazine
The full paper can also be found here:
http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~mrubenst/tro20a.pdf