TY - GEN
T1 - Hierarchical multi-robot coordination - Aggregation strategies using hybrid communication
AU - Meng, Yan
AU - Nickerson, Jeffrey V.
AU - Gan, Jing
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Aggregation strategy
KW - Hybrid communications
KW - Multi-robot coordination
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77954078867&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=77954078867&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:77954078867
SN - 9728865600
SN - 9789728865603
T3 - ICINCO 2006 - 3rd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, Proceedings
SP - 289
EP - 295
BT - ICINCO 2006 - 3rd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, Proceedings
T2 - 3rd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, ICINCO 2006
Y2 - 1 August 2006 through 5 August 2006
ER -