Multi-robot caravanning

We study multi-robot caravanning, which is loosely defined as the problem of a heterogeneous team of robots visiting specific areas of an environment (waypoints) as a group. After formally defining this problem, we propose a novel solution that requires minimal communication and scales with the number of waypoints and robots. Our approach restricts explicit communication and coordination to occur only when robots reach waypoints, and relies on implicit coordination when moving between a given pair of waypoints. At the heart of our algorithm is the use of leader election to efficiently exploit the unique environmental knowledge available to each robot in order to plan paths for the group, which makes it general enough to work with robots that have heterogeneous representations of the environment. We implement our approach both in simulation and on a physical platform, and characterize the performance of the approach under various scenarios. We demonstrate that our approach can successfully be used to combine the planning capabilities of different agents.

Authors

• Jory Denny
• Andrew Giese
• Aditya Mahadevan
• Arnaud Marfaing
• Rachel Glockenmeier
• Colton Revia
• Samuel Rodríguez
• Nancy M. Amato

Keywords

• Robot kinematics
• Robot sensing systems
• Nominations and elections
• Measurement
• Planning
• Simulation Approach
• Path Planning
• Representation Of The Environment
• Swarm Robotics
• Explicit Communication
• Physical Platform
• Leader Election
• Cause Of Failure
• Group Of Agents
• Visibility Graph
• Limited Communication
• Robotic Platform
• Extended Kalman Filter
• Distributed Manner
• Global Knowledge
• Prior Approaches
• Robot Movement
• Physical Robot
• Robotic Group
• Ability Of Robots
• Rapidly-exploring Random Tree
• Valid Path