Abstract
This paper presents networked controllers for the coordination of multi-robot systems, inspired by the chemotaxis of bacteria. Chemotaxis is a biological phenomenon wherein each organism senses the concentration of a chemical in its environment and moves to the highest (or lowest) concentration point. The problem studied herein is a coverage problem, specifically, the problem of finding networked controllers to deploy robots so that they are located uniformly on a given space. To solve this problem, we decompose a global performance index quantifying the achieved degree of coverage into local indices that can be calculated in a distributed manner over the network of robots. By combining this with a controller causing chemotaxis, we present a solution to the coverage problem wherein each robot performs either a forward movement or random rotation based on the local performance index at each time step. Moreover, we extend this solution to rendezvous at an unspecified point. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that our solution achieves coverage and rendezvous only via the above two types of robot movements and can handle different tasks simply by changing the global performance index, through the appropriate use of the chemotaxis controller.
Highlights
We focus on bacteria, namely Escherichia coli (E. coli), and the controller for their chemotaxis [7]–[9]
In [41], we considered formation control and investigated the effects of two types of chemotaxis controllers on the accuracy of the resulting formation, whereas this study aims to establish a fundamental framework to generate the cooperative behavior of robots through the interactions by the networking of the chemotaxis controllers
COVERAGE VIA NETWORKING OF Chemotaxis CONTROLLERS we present a solution to Problem 1
Summary
This is a fundamental task in multi-robot systems, and its applications include environment monitoring using a mobile sensor network. In the field of control theory, a number of researchers have studied coverage [19], [30]–[33] and rendezvous [34]–[37] for multi-robot systems They considered unicycle-type robots similar to those used in this study and proposed controllers using information on the positions and orientations of the robots. [vj]j∈J := [v1 v4 ] for v1, v2, . . . , v5 and J := {1, 4}
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