Abstract
A multi-robot formation composed of autonomous agents may need to maintain an overall rigid shape for tasks such as collective transport of an object. To distribute control, we construct leader-follow formations in the plane that are persistent: designated “leader” robots control the movement of the entire formation, while the remaining “follower” robots maintain directed local links sensing data to other robots in such a way that the entire formation retains its overall shape. In this paper, we present an approach based on rigidity theory for constructing persistent leader-follower formations with redundancy; specified robots may experience sensor link failure without losing the persistence of the formation. Within this model, we consider the impact of special positions due to certain geometric conditions and provide simulation results confirming the expected behavior.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for discussions at the 2014 AIM Workshop on Configuration spaces of linkages, 2015 BIRS Workshop on Advances in Combinatorial and Geometric Rigidity and the 2016 ICMS Workshop on Geometric Rigidity Theory and Applications. We would also like to thank Joydeep Biswas for insightful conversations that stimulated the results in this paper and reviewers for their helpful feedback. A. Burns and A. St. John were partially supported by NSF IIS-1253146 and the Clare Boothe Luce Foundation. B. Schulze was supported by EPSRC grant EP/M013642/1.
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Burns, A., Schulze, B., St. John, A. (2018). Persistent Multi-robot Formations with Redundancy. In: Groß, R., et al. Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_10
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