A Distributed Heuristic for Energy-Efficient Multirobot Multiplace Rendezvous

Abstract

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> We consider the problem of finding a set of trajectories for a heterogeneous group of mobile robots, such that a single service robot can rendezvous with every other member of the team in a prescribed order, and the total travel cost is minimized. We present a simple heuristic controller that runs independently on each robot, yet is guaranteed to achieve an approximation to global solution in bounded time linear in population size. Simulation experiments empirically show that the method finds approximated solutions of near-optimal quality on average. </para>