Power-aware rendezvous with shrinking footprints

Abstract

In this paper we investigate how power consumption affects mobility-based coordination algorithms for multi-robot systems by explicitly coupling the control laws to the available power levels. In particular, we will consider a sensor network comprising of mobile sensors which use omni directional RF or radar based antennas for communication, with a disk-shaped communications footprint. As power decrease with time, the footprint shrinks as well, and in this paper we propose a controller that solves the rendezvous problem for such systems, thus providing a novel coupling between mobility algorithms and the available power levels.