Connectivity management in mobile robot teams

We develop a framework for controlling a team of robots to maintain and improve a communication bridge between a stationary robot and an independently exploring robot in a walled environment. We make use of two metrics for characterizing the communication: the Fiedler value of the weighted Laplacian...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation pp. 1525 - 1530
Main Authors Stump, E., Jadbabaie, A., Kumar, V.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.05.2008
Subjects
Bridges
Communication system control
Computer vision
Control systems
Convergence
Laplace equations
Mobile robots
Robot control
Robotics and automation
USA Councils
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ISBN1424416469
9781424416462
ISSN1050-4729
DOI10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543418

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Summary:We develop a framework for controlling a team of robots to maintain and improve a communication bridge between a stationary robot and an independently exploring robot in a walled environment. We make use of two metrics for characterizing the communication: the Fiedler value of the weighted Laplacian describing the communication interactions of all the robots in the system, and the k-connectivity matrix that expresses which robots can interact through k or less intermediary robots. At each step, we move in such a way as to improve the Fiedler value as much as possible while keeping the number of intermediary robots between the two robots of interest below a desired value. We demonstrate the use of this framework in a scenario where the hop-count constraint cannot be satisfied, but show that communication quality is maintained anyways.
ISBN:1424416469
9781424416462
ISSN:1050-4729
DOI:10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543418