Multi-robot Aggregation Strategies with Limited Communication

Abstract

The limited power, low radio range, and an ever changing environment make the ability to explicitly communicate between multi-robots decreases in a searching task. When this happens, maintaining the weakened connection will cause robots to cluster during searching, which may be suboptimal with respect to the searching time. In this paper, several integration strategies are proposed to coordinate a team of robots which have limited explicit communication. To speed up the reconnection procedure for the proposed aggregate strategies, implicit communication through vision sensors is proposed in this paper to establish a movement plan to recover the explicit communication. Simulation results are presented and discussed; The real-world experiments with 3 Pioneer robots have been conducted. The proposed strategies can be extended to a large-scale searching environment as well as a combination of humans and robots