Global connectivity control for spatially interacting multi-robot systems with unicycle kinematics

In this paper, we consider the problem of connectivity maintenance in multi-robot systems with unicycle kinematics. While previous work has approached this problem through local control techniques, we propose a solution which achieves global connectivity maintenance under nonholonomic constraints. I...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) pp. 1255 - 1261
Main Authors Williams, Ryan K., Gasparri, Andrea, Sukhatme, Gaurav S., Ulivi, Giovanni
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.05.2015
Subjects
Eigenvalues and eigenfunctions
Estimation
Maintenance engineering
Multi-robot systems
Robot sensing systems
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Summary:In this paper, we consider the problem of connectivity maintenance in multi-robot systems with unicycle kinematics. While previous work has approached this problem through local control techniques, we propose a solution which achieves global connectivity maintenance under nonholonomic constraints. In addition, our formulation only requires intermittent estimation of algebraic connectivity, and accommodates discontinuous spatial interactions among robots. Specifically, we extend a decision-based link maintenance framework to unicycle kinematics and discontinuous potential-based interaction, by exploiting techniques from nonsmooth analysis. Then, we couple this extension with an existing connectivity estimation technique which yields an estimate with tunable precision in finite time, achieving our result. To illustrate the correctness of our methods, we provide a brief simulation result that closes the paper.
ISSN:1050-4729
2577-087X
DOI:10.1109/ICRA.2015.7139352