Abstract
Rendezvous control is an important module of a multi-robot system to enable formation control of multiple robots without losing network connectivity. This paper introduces a new coordinate-free, bearing-only algorithm, based on hierarchical tracking of wireless network topology, to enable rendezvous of distributed mobile robots at any designated leader robot node. An assumption is made that the robot can only detect and communicate with their neighbors (i.e., local sensing). The proposed approach preserves connectivity during the rendezvous task, adapts to dynamic changes in the network topology (e.g., losing or re-gaining a communication link), and is tolerant of mobility faults in the robots. We theoretically analyze the proposed algorithm and experimentally demonstrate the approach through simulations and extensive field experiments. The results indicate that the method is effective in a variety of realistic scenarios in which the robots are distributed in a cluttered environment.
Links
BibTeX (Download)
@article{Luo2019,
title = {Multi-robot Rendezvous Based on Bearing-aided Hierarchical Tracking of Network Topology},
author = {Shaocheng Luo,
Jonghoek Kim,
Ramviyas Parasuraman,
Jun Han Bae, Eric T Matson,
Byung-Cheol Min},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570870518301100},
doi = {10.1016/j.adhoc.2018.11.004},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-04-01},
journal = {Ad hoc Networks},
volume = {86},
pages = {131-143},
abstract = {Rendezvous control is an important module of a multi-robot system to enable formation control of multiple robots without losing network connectivity. This paper introduces a new coordinate-free, bearing-only algorithm, based on hierarchical tracking of wireless network topology, to enable rendezvous of distributed mobile robots at any designated leader robot node. An assumption is made that the robot can only detect and communicate with their neighbors (i.e., local sensing). The proposed approach preserves connectivity during the rendezvous task, adapts to dynamic changes in the network topology (e.g., losing or re-gaining a communication link), and is tolerant of mobility faults in the robots. We theoretically analyze the proposed algorithm and experimentally demonstrate the approach through simulations and extensive field experiments. The results indicate that the method is effective in a variety of realistic scenarios in which the robots are distributed in a cluttered environment.
},
keywords = {control, multi-robot-systems},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}