Distributed Methods for Controlling Multiple Mobile Robots

Abstract

Abstract : This project is supported jointly by ONR Grant N00014-94-1-0284 and NSF Grant IRI-9307506. Although the official starting date of the ONR grant was November 1, 1993, the work started when the NSF grant arrived in August 1993. So in the following, we report the activities since August 1993. However, since UWM received the official notification and the ONR grant number in late January, 1994, we were not able to acknowledge the support from ONR in some of the articles mentioned in this report. The intent of the project is to study the fundamentals of the distributed control method for multiple mobile robots and develop a theory for applying the method effectively. In this method, at every tick of its local clock,, each robot observes the positions of all the robots and moves to a new position determined by the given algorithm. Typically, we assume that the robots are anonymous (they all execute the same algorithm and they cannot be distinguished by their appearances), initially they do not have a common x-y coordinate system, and their local clocks may not be synchronized. A basic problem for such a robot system is to design an algorithm that, when executed individually by the robots, allows the robots as a group to achieve the given goal.