Communication connectivity is desirable for safe and efficient operation of multi-robot systems. While decentralized algorithms for connectivity maintenance have been explored in recent literature, the majority of these works do not account for robot motion and sensing uncertainties. These uncertainties are inherent in practical robots and result in robots deviating from their desired positions which could potentially result in a loss of connectivity. In this paper we present a Decentralized Connectivity Maintenance algorithm accounting for robot motion and sensing Uncertainties (DCMU). We first propose a novel weighted graph definition for the multi-robot system that accounts for the aforementioned uncertainties along with realistic connectivity constraints such as line-of-sight connectivity and collision avoidance. Next we design a decentralized gradient-based controller for connectivity maintenance where we derive the gradients of our weighted graph edge weights required for computing the control. Finally, we perform multiple simulations to validate the connectivity maintenance performance of our DCMU algorithm under robot motion and sensing uncertainties and show an improvement compared to previous work.
翻译:多机器人系统的安全和高效运行需要通信连通性。虽然最近的文献已经探讨了连接维护的分散算法,但大多数这些工程并不考虑机器人运动和感知不确定性。这些不确定性是实际机器人所固有的,导致机器人偏离其理想位置,从而可能导致连通性丧失。在本文中,我们提出了一个关于机器人运动和感知不确定性的分散连通性维护算法(DCMU)的核算。我们首先为多机器人系统提出了一个新的加权图表定义,其中说明了上述不确定性以及现实的连通性限制,如直线连通性和避免碰撞。接下来,我们设计了一个分散的基于梯度的连通性控制器,用于连通性维护,我们从中得出计算控制所需的加权图形边缘重量的梯度。最后,我们进行了多次模拟,以验证机器人运动和感知不确定性下的DCMU算法的连通性功能,并显示与以往工作相比的改进。