Fault-tolerant formations of mobile robots

Abstract

Abstract-The goal of a robot formation control architecture is to get a number of robots into a specified form. To be effective and practical, the control architecture must be able to transition a group of robots from an initial swarm to a final formation. It must then be able to handle real-world events that could disrupt the formation, thus, requiring formation repair, obstacle avoidance, and changes in the formation. In previous work, we presented a distributed, reactive cellular automatabased formation control architecture capable of controlling any number of robots in formation at once. In this paper, we examine our architecture with respect to necessary characteristics to handle real-world occurrences. To address issues of formation repair and obstacle avoidance, the control architecture is extended by a distributed auctioning method that allows the robot formation to reconfigure autonomously.

Distributed Auction-Based Initialization of Mobile Robot Formations

“…As described in our previous work (Mead et al 2009) and demonstrated in simulation, the auctioning of a single cell begins with the auctioneer, c i , requesting information on the formation relative position in question, p j . One of three responses may occur at this point: (1) If the position is already occupied, having been filled in an auction generated by a third cell, c j , will respond directly, exchanging state information with the auctioneer.…”

“…A topic-based publish/subscribe model is used to facilitate communication among a group of cells in the automaton and among robots wishing to join the formation (Mead et al 2009). The publish/subscribe paradigm allows a distributed group of agents to send (i.e., publish) and receive (i.e., subscribe) various types of information regarding select topics of interest.…”

Fault-Tolerant Formation Driving Mechanism Designed for Heterogeneous MAVs-UGVs Groups

“…This problem is addressed for formations of terrestrial robots in [21]. In the paper, the formation is represented as a cellular automaton, where each formation member is represented as an individual cell, and the formation recovery is realized through a distributed auction-based mechanism.…”

A Distributed Method for Evaluating Properties of a Robot Formation

“…The algorithm is currently being implemented in simulation and, later, will be extended to a physical multirobot platform, both described in (Mead 2008). Once integrated into CATALST, we will reevaluate the formation control architecture with respect to existing criteria (Fredslund & Matarić 2002, Mead et al 2009).…”

“…As the formation gains or loses robots, moves through an environment, or otherwise changes, it can become necessary for the network of robots to autonomously reorganize while still yielding the user-specified global structure (Mead et al 2009). We propose a distributed method for evaluating properties of the multi-robot system, and then discuss how this information can be applied to improve performance with respect to a given operation.…”