Distributed Connectivity-Aware Multirobot Exploration

Distributed Connectivity-Aware Multirobot Exploration

Kuijsters, W.A.A.

Keviczky, T. (mentor)

Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering

Delft Center for Systems and Control

2015-05-08

Networks of mobile robots enable us to explore areas quickly and without danger to human operators. To execute this task successfully, communication between the robots in the network is imperative. In this thesis, we link communication between robots to network integrity, where network integrity is defined as the ability of the network to communicate its acquired data to all robots in the network and to the human operator. We first introduce a greedy exploration algorithm which will be used as the basis of this connectivity-aware exploration algorithm. Then, we propose two different algorithms that each aim to maintain network integrity by using relaying robots: - The Laplacian algorithm aims to keep the graph of robots connected, which means that the graph Laplacian has a positive Fiedler value. The relaying robots actively maintain network integrity while the exploration robots execute the greedy exploration task. - The Data Transmission Rate (DTR) algorithm aims to preserve enough bandwidth for the exploration robots. All robots simultaneously attempt to preserve this bandwidth, and through artificial potential functions a control law is devised to allow for exploration. We present simulation results based on a series of scenarios, which involve exploration of a rectangular obstacle-free area. From the results, we conclude that the DTR algorithm performs significantly better in terms of exploration time and size of the explored area. Still, many improvements can be made to the DTR algorithm, such as incorporating obstacle avoidance and finding realistic parameters for the signal strength function used in the algorithm.

SDP
Distribution
robotic exploration
optimization
connectivity

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:22772c2f-7fb9-4775-9461-73099de52583

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2015 Kuijsters, W.A.A.