Tecnura (Jan 2014)
Autonomous navigation strategy for robot swarms using local communication
Abstract
Our motivation focuses on answering a simple question: What is the minimum robotic structure necessary to solve a navigation problem? Our research deals with environments that are unknown, dynamic, and denied to sensors. In particular, the paper addresses problems concerning how to coordinate the navigation of multi-ple autonomous mobile robots without requiring system identification, geometric map building, localization or state estimation. The proposed navigation algorithm uses the gradient of the environment to set the navigation control. This gradient is continuously modified by all the robots in the form of local communication. The design scheme, both for the algorithm and for its implementation on robots, searches for a minimal approximation, in which it minimizes the requirements of the robot (processing power, communication and kind of sensors). Besides, our research finds autonomous navigation for each robot, and also scales the system to any number of agents. The navigation algorithm is formulated for a grouping task, where the robots form autonomous groups without any external interaction or prior information of the environment or information from other robots. Finally, task performance is verified through simulation for the laboratory prototypes of the group.
