Strategies for coordinated multirobot exploration with recurrent connectivity constraints

Abstract

During several applications, such as search and rescue, robots must discover new information about the environment and, at the same time, share operational knowledge with a base station through an ad hoc network. In this paper, we design exploration strategies that allow robots to coordinate with teammates to form such a network in order to satisfy recurrent connectivity constraints -that is, data must be shared with the base station when making new observations at the assigned locations. Current approaches lack in flexibility due to the assumptions made about the communication model. Furthermore, they are sometimes inefficient because of the synchronous way they work: new plans are issued only once all robots have reached their goals. This paper introduces two novel asynchronous strategies that work with arbitrary communication models. In this paper, 'asynchronous' means that it is possible to issue new plans to subgroups of robots, when they are ready to receive them. First, we propose a singlestage strategy based on Integer Linear Programming for selecting and assigning robots to locations. Second, we design a two-stage strategy to improve computational efficiency, by separating the problem of locations' selection from that of robot-location assignments. Extensive testing both in simulation and with real robots show that the proposed strategies provide good situa-

A rendezvous approach for correcting accumulative errors of multiple robots

“…Recently, a few of new trends appeared, for example, energy-constrained coordination [2], joint exploration and tracking [3], and coordination under recurrent communication constraints [4]. An energy-constrained spatiotemporal rendezvous problem of multi-robot systems was discussed [2].…”

“…An energy-constrained spatiotemporal rendezvous problem of multi-robot systems was discussed [2]. It was formulated as an optimization problem with a global cost function and local constraints, where all robots were minimizing a same objective function, but each robot had its own constraint.…”

“…For two robots belonged to different subsets S k ∈S and S m ∈S (k ≠ m), they will fuse their coordinates information also by (2) to (6) Fig. 2 Initialization for exploration discourse of another multi-robot system (n = 6); all characters in the figure have the same meanings as in Fig.…”

“…Therefore, the corresponding coordinated strategy emphasized on minimizing repeated coverage and task balancing across robots. Lots of results are available to deal with the subject [1][2][3][4]. However, uncertainties which are intrinsic in sensing and acting for all robots have not been addressed in the above results.…”

Cost Adaptation for Robust Decentralized Swarm Behaviour

“…In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have proven useful for a number of tasks -such as searching, exploration, and area mapping [1], [2], [3]. However, the maximum flight time of these systems is still limited.…”