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Wireless communication with no range and bandwidth limitations is desired for coordination and information sharing among multiple robots. However, the perfect communication is not available for a few of reasons. This paper proposed a simple yet effective scheme for correcting odometer errors existed in each robot of a multi-robot system. A contribution is that additional communication bandwidth is needed only if a rendezvous for two robots happened. Implementation of the error correction scheme is addressed in detail. Moreover, rendezvous is formulated by a set of predicate logic reasoning implications for each robot at upper level of soft architecture. The proposed approach was validated by computer simulations.

The research progress for Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) is of great significance to human offshore operations. Target detection is the foundation for USV applications. Ocean wave, frog, and illumination are the most important factors that affect exactness of target detection through visible and infrared images. This paper proposes an algorithm for weighted averaging fusion of visible/infrared images. Firstly, the visible light/infrared devices are required to collect the target surrounding information, perform feature analysis, and complete the anti-fog and de-noising preprocessing. These operations aim at improving the accuracy of image segmentation. Secondly, feature extractions of the visible and infrared target images are performed, respectively, and the recognition of the target image is further completed. Finally, image fusion is performed by weighted averaging of the targets detected by visible light and infrared images. The fusion uses a matching matrix to represent the similarity of the two images. When the two images are very similar, the image is fused by weighting pixels, which effectively improves the accuracy of the detection. Lots of simulations were conducted on MATLAB 2015a with a personal computer, and the results verified the success rate of target detection and recognition.

To improve time efficiency for structured environment exploration of multi-robot systems, a novel coordinated strategy based on predicate logic reasoning is proposed in this paper. The strategy assigns the room with maximal utility to the robot with the optimal exploring property, and realizes cooperative exploration by considering the room capacity. A set of predicate logic reasoning formulas is established to implement the coordination. The coordination takes into account robot performance and environment property and is conducted in a distributed manner. In addition, to save computing and storage resources, a triple set named as task information was proposed instead of traditional unfinished job list for environment information sharing among robots. The results are validated by computer simulations for two simulated office like environments.