This paper presents techniques for exploiting redundancy in teams of mobile robots. In particular, we address tasks involving the kinematic coordination of several communicating robots. Teams are modeled as highly redundant spatial mechanisms for which multi-objective, coiicurrent controllers are constructed using a generalization of nullspace control. The goal is to develop a methodology in which the robustness and error suppression in a control theoretic substrate can be used to preserve critical properties in teams of reactive robots. The resulting "safe" control options can then be explored while guaranteeing global compliance with system specifications. The proposed architecture depends on a set of concurrent, low-dimensional control processes that interact in a welldefined manner. Cascaded null space projections and coordination templates are used to inanage control interactions across platforms that actively maintain constraints for pairs of robots. Pairwise policies can then be conibined to represent coordinated, multi-robot tasks. To illustrate the approach, we denionstrate a distributed control that maintains critical connectivity in line-of-sight communication networks. Keywords: constraint-based programming, h,ybrid systems, rea.ctive control We propose a hybrid robot control strategy for multiple interacting robots. Swarms, especially biological swarms, have been noted to produce interesting behavior using massively distributed control algorithms (termites, ants, bees, etc). Distributing swarm behavior over many individuals can be very cost effective and the swarm can be robust to failure in indil-iduals. However, the flexibility and reconfigurability of such an approach is challenging as there do not exist adequate methodologies for prograniniing a swarm to do many different tasks.  299
In REF , the authors develop a Line-Of-Sight communication model and show how the constraints can be optimised for different criteria that depend on the local state of the mobile robot.
Coordinated teams of reactive mobile platforms
Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292)
Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292)
Engineering Computer Science