Command Control for Many-Robot Systems

Abstract

Rapidly evolving sensor, effector and processing technologies, including micromechanical fabrication techniques, will soon make possible the development of very inexpensive autonomous mobile devices with adequate processing but fairly limited sensor capabilities. One goal which has been proposed is to employ large numbers (more than 100) of these simple robots to achieve real-world military mission goals in the ground, air, and underwater environments, using sensor-based reactive planners to realize desired emergent collective group behaviors. One key prerequisite to realizing this goal is the capability to command and control the system of robots in terms of meaningful mission-oriented system-level parameters. A commander requires an understanding of a system's capabilities, doctrine for employing it, and measures of effectiveness to assess its performance once deployed. It is thus necessary to relate system (ensemble) functionality and performance to the behaviors realized by the individual autonomous elements. This paper describes a program of analysis, modeling, algorithm development, and simulation which has been undertaken to develop, refine, and validate this basic approach to real-world problem solving. The initial thrust has been to develop generic behaviors, such as blanket, barrier, and sweep coverage, and various deployment and recovery modes, which can address a broad spectrum of generic applications such as mine deployment, minesweeping, surveillance, sentry duty, maintenance inspection, ship hull cleaning, and communications relaying. Initial simulation results are presented.

Mobile Sensor Network Deployment using Potential Fields: A Distributed, Scalable Solution to the Area Coverage Problem

“…The concept of coverage as a paradigm for evaluating many-robot systems was introduced by Gage [5]. Gage defines three basic types of coverage: blanket coverage, where the objective is to achieve a static arrangement of nodes that maximizes the total detection area; barrier coverage, where the objective is to minimize the probability of undetected penetration through the barrier; and sweep coverage, which is more-or-less equivalent to a moving barrier.…”

On Combining Multi-robot Coverage and Reciprocal Collision Avoidance

“…We base our categorization of collision scenarios in multi-robot coverage on the categorization of coverage behaviors by [2] and the categorization of interactions among agents by [7], where interactions are classified along the axes of "individual or shared goals", "actions advance goals of others", and "awareness of others". For the multi-robot coverage tasks of our interest, we assume that the robots are aware of each other.…”

“…The collision scenarios 6) in Fig. 1 illustrate that the robots must either avoid reciprocal collisions at the boundaries of their Voronoi cells (intragroup collision avoidance) 2 or within the cells, in case several robots-possibly of different teams (this would mean intergroup collision avoidance)-sweep the same Voronoi cell for purposes of redundant coverage.…”

“…Deployment and sweeping motion for robotic coverage of areas and boundaries (e.g., barriers) have previously also been referred to as blanket, barrier and sweep coverage [2]. A particular type of blanket coverage is Voronoi coverage [3], which arranges the robots in a final configuration that forms a so-called Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT) [4].…”

Robotic Swarm Dispersion Using Wireless Intensity Signals

“…In 1992 Gage was the first to consider the problem of area coverage by a team of robots [4]. He categorized the problem into three types: blanket coverage, barrier coverage, and sweep coverage.…”