Santa Barbara Distributed Coordination for Teams of Robots

Distributed Coordination for Teams of Robots by Joseph William Durham It is anticipated that in the near future autonomous teams of mobile robots will revolutionize the transportation of passengers and goods, search and rescue operations, and other applications. Challenging questions arise in designing coordination algorithms to synthesize and act on spatially distributed information so that a robotic team reaches a desirable global level of performance. We explore distributed coordination algorithms in two application areas. An emphasis of our work is on models and algorithms which can handle limited communication, localization errors, and the other challenges of hardware implementation. The first application is territory partitioning and coverage in non-convex environments. We present coverage algorithms for two communication models: shortrange, unreliable “gossip” communication between pairs of agents, and sporadic contact between individual robots and a central base station. In both cases we handle arbitrary non-convex environments by representing them as connected graphs. Our coverage algorithms drive teams of robots towards territory par-