Hierarchical multi-robot coordination - Aggregation strategies using hybrid communication

Yan Meng, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Jing Gan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Multi-robot coordination is important for searching tasks. Usually discussions of this coordination presuppose a reliable explicit communication infrastructure. However, limited power, low radio range, and an ever changing environment all hinder communication. Maintaining weakened connections will cause robots to cluster during searching, which may be suboptimal with respect to the searching time. In this paper, hierarchical-based aggregation strategies are proposed to coordinate a team of robots with limited communication. To speed up the reconnection procedure for the proposed aggregate strategies, a hybrid communication approach is proposed in this paper to establish a movement plan to recover the explicit communication through vision sensors. Simulation results are presented and discussed. Experiments with 3 Pioneer robots have been conducted, and the experimental results show that our proposed strategies using a hybrid communication mechanism are feasible and efficient in a searching task. The proposed strategies can be extended to a large-scale searching environment as well as to a combination of humans and robots.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICINCO 2006 - 3rd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, Proceedings
Pages289-295
Number of pages7
StatePublished - 2006
Event3rd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, ICINCO 2006 - Setubal, Portugal
Duration: 1 Aug 20065 Aug 2006

Publication series

NameICINCO 2006 - 3rd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, Proceedings
VolumeRA

Conference

Conference3rd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, ICINCO 2006
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CitySetubal
Period1/08/065/08/06

Keywords

  • Aggregation strategy
  • Hybrid communications
  • Multi-robot coordination

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