<title>Distributed multisensor integration in a cooperative multirobot system</title>

Abstract

A trend is emerging, as detailed by McKee, towards the use of networks of smaller distributed robots for complicated tasks. A number of areas need to be addressed before such systems can be put into practical environments. Among these are the transfer and sharing of information between robots, control strategies for sensing and movement, interfaces for teleoperator assistance to the multirobot systems, and degree of autonomy. This paper presents a cooperative multirobot system framework that has a flexible degree of autonomy, depending on the complexity of the task that is to be performed. The system uses a wavelet-based method to address the pose and orientation calculations for robot positioning. Our previous work in this area demonstrated that reasonable sensor integration can be done within the wavelet domain at the coarse level. Augmented finite state machines are used under a subsumption architecture for control and integration of local and global maps for the multirobot system. This allows us to explicitly include the teleoperator interface in the system design. We also present the results of an experimental simulation study of a spinning satellite retrieval by three cooperating robots. This simulation includes full orbital dynamics effects such as atmospheric drag and non-spherical gravitation field perturbations.