HIERARCHICAL MULTI-ROBOT COORDINATION - Aggregation Strategies Using Hybrid Communication

Yan Meng, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Jing Gan

2006

Abstract

Multi-robot coordination is important for searching tasks. Usually discussions of this coordination presuppose a reliable explicit communication infrastructure. However, limited power, low radio range, and an ever changing environment all hinder communication. Maintaining weakened connections will cause robots to cluster during searching, which may be suboptimal with respect to the searching time. In this paper, hierarchical-based aggregation strategies are proposed to coordinate a team of robots with limited communication. To speed up the reconnection procedure for the proposed aggregate strategies, a hybrid communication approach is proposed in this paper to establish a movement plan to recover the explicit communication through vision sensors. Simulation results are presented and discussed. Experiments with 3 Pioneer robots have been conducted, and the experimental results show that our proposed strategies using a hybrid communication mechanism are feasible and efficient in a searching task. The proposed strategies can be extended to a large-scale searching environment as well as to a combination of humans and robots.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Meng Y., V. Nickerson J. and Gan J. (2006). HIERARCHICAL MULTI-ROBOT COORDINATION - Aggregation Strategies Using Hybrid Communication . In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO, ISBN 978-972-8865-60-3, pages 289-295. DOI: 10.5220/0001212802890295

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco06,
author={Yan Meng and Jeffrey V. Nickerson and Jing Gan},
title={HIERARCHICAL MULTI-ROBOT COORDINATION - Aggregation Strategies Using Hybrid Communication},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO,},
year={2006},
pages={289-295},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001212802890295},
isbn={978-972-8865-60-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO,
TI - HIERARCHICAL MULTI-ROBOT COORDINATION - Aggregation Strategies Using Hybrid Communication
SN - 978-972-8865-60-3
AU - Meng Y.
AU - V. Nickerson J.
AU - Gan J.
PY - 2006
SP - 289
EP - 295
DO - 10.5220/0001212802890295