Bayesian rendezvous for distributed robotic systems

Abstract

In this paper, we state, using thorough mathematical analysis, sufficient conditions to perform a rendezvous maneuver with a group of differential-wheeled robots endowed with an on-board, noisy, local positioning system. In particular, we extend the existing framework of noise-free, graph-based distributed control with a layer of Bayesian reasoning allowing to solve the rendezvous problem more efficiently in presence of uncertainties and in a probabilistically sound way. Finally we perform extensive experiments with a team of four real robots, and simulation with their corresponding simulated counterpart, to confirm the benefits of our Bayesian approach.