Distributed motion coordination of multiple robots

Abstract

This paper investigates the motion control issues involved in distributing the task of transporting an object over a group of homogeneous mobile robots. We assume that each individual robot has no advanced sensory or communication capability. The motion control here refers to that of the robots to form some geometric pattern before they start moving and to maintain the geometric pattern while the robots are moving towards a goal location. The motion control of the robots is implemented in a distributed fashion. A distributed, concurrent algorithm for forming geometric patterns is discussed. Different control methods are presented and the simulation results from resting these methods are examined. The objective is to study the complexity of motion coordination of the robots in performing the overall task. The ultimate goal is to identify a method that requires minimum real-time inter-robot communication and computational effort to achieve the group goal.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>