Coordinated traffic scheduling for communicating mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper, a multi-robot networking paradigm is presented. This provides a general framework for coordination among a group of robots. An experiment is conducted showing the effectiveness of the developed network paradigm where a robot controls a group of robots. A coordinated traffic scheduling method is proposed for mobile robots. The aim is to build onboard knowledge for autonomous robots without ranging sensors (sonar or laser range finder) and/or cameras. In this work, more emphasis is given on the exploration of interactions between a pair of robots. The robots share their positions, orientations and safety information and the decision of a robot depends on interactions of the forward safe paths (FSPs) of these robots. The properties of intersection of two straight lines are used to classify different situations. The proposed method is discussed in details with various combinations of scenarios. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.