Motion control strategies for improved multi robot perception

Abstract

This paper describes a strategy to select optimal motions of multi robot systems equipped with cameras in such a way that they can successively improve the observation of the environment. We present a solution designed for omnidirectional cameras, although the results can be extended to conventional cameras. The key idea is the selection of a finite set of candidate next positions for every robot within their local landmark-based stochastic maps. In this way, the cost function measuring the perception improvement when a robot moves to a new position can be easily evaluated on the finite set of candidate positions. Then, the robots in the team can coordinate based on these small pieces of information. The proposed strategy is designed to be integrated with a map merging algorithm where robots fuse their maps to get a more precise knowledge of the environment. The interest of the proposed strategy for uncertainty reduction is that it is suitable for visual sensing, allows an efficient information exchange, presents a low computational cost and makes the robot coordination easier.