Abstract
Precise localization and formation control are one of the key technologies to achieve coordination and control of swarm robots, which is also currently a bottleneck for practical applications of swarm robotic systems. Aiming at overcoming the limited individual perception and the difficulty of achieving precise localization and formation, a localization approach combining dead reckoning (DR) with wireless sensor network- (WSN-) based methods is proposed in this paper. Two kinds of WSN localization technologies are adopted in this paper, that is, ZigBee-based RSSI (received signal strength indication) global localization and electronic tag floors for calibration of local positioning. First, the DR localization information is combined with the ZigBee-based RSSI position information using the Kalman filter method to achieve precise global localization and maintain the robot formation. Then the electronic tag floors provide the robots with their precise coordinates in some local areas and enable the robot swarm to calibrate its formation by reducing the accumulated position errors. Hence, the overall performance of localization and formation control of the swarm robotic system is improved. Both of the simulation results and the experimental results on a real schematic system are given to demonstrate the success of the proposed approach.
Highlights
The application area of robot continues to expand since the 1980s, and single robot can no longer satisfy the increasing requirement due to the complication of tasks and working environments
The swarm robotic system is a kind of special multirobot system which focuses the realization of individual physical robot as well as the interaction of robots with each other and the environment; that is, the related studies are concerned with how to design a relatively simple individual robot physically so that to get the desired collective behavior emerging from the interactions of robot to robot and robot to environment
The swarm robot system derives from the multirobot system, there are some major differences comparing with other multirobot systems: the robot’s autonomy, large number of the robots, homogeneity of the robots, the incapability and inefficiency which can be interpreted as simplicity of a single robot, and the limited sensing range [3]
Summary
The application area of robot continues to expand since the 1980s, and single robot can no longer satisfy the increasing requirement due to the complication of tasks and working environments. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation listed the robot coordination as a special subject in 1986. Several international conferences such as the Swarm Robotics and Swarm Intelligence have been held regularly in the last decade. A swarm robot system is highly redundant. It has strong robust performance and the ability to adapt to the environment dynamically, which exceeds the capability of other kinds of robot systems, especially the single robot system. Swarm robotic systems are used in many occasions, such as organizing robots into certain formations, deployment of distributed sensors, mapping of the environment, and goal-searching [1, 2]. The swarm robot system derives from the multirobot system, there are some major differences comparing with other multirobot systems: the robot’s autonomy, large number of the robots, homogeneity of the robots, the incapability and inefficiency which can be interpreted as simplicity of a single robot, and the limited sensing range [3]
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