1. Coordination with the leader in a robotic team without active communication
- Author
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Ming Cao, Brian D. O. Anderson, Changbin Yu, Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen, and Discrete Technology and Production Automation
- Subjects
Engineering ,Robot kinematics ,business.industry ,Cayley-Menger determinant ,Multi-agent system ,Autonomous agent ,Real-time computing ,range measurement ,Control engineering ,LOCALIZATION ,MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS ,Measure (mathematics) ,Computer Science::Robotics ,Feature (computer vision) ,Position (vector) ,Robot ,autonomous agents ,business ,CONSENSUS ,Wireless sensor network ,leader-follower structure - Abstract
We propose a coordination algorithm for robotic multi-agent systems with leader-follower structures so that when a leader moves with a constant velocity, its followers can compute the leader's velocity after measuring their distances to the leader for a finite number of times. One feature of the proposed algorithm is that no active communication is needed, and as a result, the algorithm becomes advantageous in the application of robotic sensor networks where energy efficient algorithms are highly desirable to maximize network lifespan. The algorithm makes use of the Cayley-Menger determinant which is a powerful tool from distance geometry. It is shown that the proposed algorithm has the potential to be applied to robotic swarms in a challenging scenario where each robot is installed with only range sensors and cannot measure the position of a target directly.
- Published
- 2009