Controlling wild mobile robots using virtual gates and discrete transitions

Abstract

Abstract-We present an approach to controlling multiple mobile robots without requiring system identification, geometric map building, localization, or state estimation. Instead, we purposely design them to execute wild motions, which means each will strike every open set infinitely often along the boundary of any connected region in which it is placed. We then divide the environment into a discrete set of regions, with borders delineated with simple markers, such as colored tape. Using simple sensor feedback, we show that complex tasks can be solved, such as patrolling, disentanglement, and basic navigation. The method is implemented in simulation and on real robots, which for many tasks are fully distributed without any mutual communication.

A model of exploration and goal-searching in the cockroach, Blaberus discoidalis

“…Distributed systems or swarms of robots may get better coverage with stochastic behavior. The RAMBLER algorithm could be an alternative motion for the types of multi-robot gate-controlled behavior suggested by Bobadilla, Martinez, Gobst, Gossman, and LaValle (2012).…”

Voluntary Retreat for Decentralized Interference Reduction in Robot Swarms

“…The robots do not have any prior knowledge of where the transport locations are, and traverse the domain with trajectories which are ergodic (e.g., [32], [33]) with respect to a uniform distribution. The density distribution φ : D → R corresponding to a uniformly ergodic trajectory is given by φ(x) = |D| −1 , ∀x ∈ D where |D| is the area of the domain.…”

Using the delaunay triangulation and voronoi diagrams for navigation in observable environments

“…The route planning strategies for autonomous mobile robots have been fairly treated in many references (LaValle, 2006;Zhang et al, 2007;Afzulpurkar & Thanh, 2008;Mannadiar, 2010;Bobadilla et al, 2012). We seek to avoid obstacles using global strategies: the first and most used ones are artificial potential fields (Guanghui et al, 2012;Bin-qiang et al, 2011) or algorithms specifically purely geometric triangulation (Kallmann, 2005;Xu et al, 2009;Demyen & Buro, 2006) and many other cell-based geometry such as Voronoi diagrams (Dong et al, 2010;Shao & Lee, 2010), as well as the Delaunay method (Hongyang et al, 2008) that is also interesting.…”