Decentralized Navigation in 3D Space of a Robotic Swarm with Heterogeneous Abilities

Abstract

This paper proposes a decentralized method for navigation of multiple robots, each of which has different abilities, by a single leader robot in 3D space, especially focusing on the connectivity maintenance. We assume a swarm of robots whose sensing ranges, maximum speeds and maximum accelerations are different. For such robots, we propose a control method for maintaining the whole connectivity by each agent's keeping local connectivity in a decentralized way. We also mathematically prove that the proposed method can enable multiple robots to navigate in 3D space while keeping the connectivity. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.