We consider a team of mobile robots equipped with sensors and wireless network cards and the task of navigating to a desired location in a formation. We develop a set of algorithms for (a) discovery; (b) cooperative localization; and (c) cooperative control. Discovery involves the use of sensory information to organize the robots into a mobile network allowing each robot to establish its neighb...

Abstract—We describe a framework for controlling and coordinating a group of nonholonomic mobile robots for cooperative tasks ranging from scouting and reconnaissance to distributed manipulation. The framework allows us to build complex systems from simple controllers and estimators. This modular approach is attractive because of the potential for reusability. In addition, we show that our appr...

The traditional control problems of trajectory-tracking and regulation have been extensively studied in the field of mobile robotics. In particular, the differential and the omnidirectional mobile robots, also known, respectively, as the (2,0) and the (3,0) robots (see (Bétourné & Campion, 1996), (Campion et al., 1996), have attracted the interest of many control researchers. It is a common pra...

We present in this work the performances of a mobile omnidirectional robot through evaluating its management of the redundancy of actuation. Thus we come to the predictive control implemented. The distribution of the wringer on the robot actions, through the inverse pseudo of Moore-Penrose, corresponds to a « geometric ›› distribution of efforts. We will show that the load on vehicle wheels wou...

This paper describes the OmniEye, an omnidirectional vision system developed to track mobile robots in AURAL, i. e., in a computational structured environment. AURAL aims to control the interaction between visual, sound and robotic information in a research for automatic and semi-automatic processes of artistic production. Different convex mirrors can be used to achieve an omnidirectional syste...

In this paper, we present experimental results got with the omnidirectional sensor SYCLOP “Conical SYstem for LOcalization and Perception” for localisation of mobile robots. This system, which is able to get a panoramic view of a 2π radian field, is made of a CCD camera and a vertically oriented conic shaped reflector. We give at first a method to calibrate the whole omnidirectional taking in a...

Omnidirectional mobile robots are capable of arbitrary motion in an arbitrary direction without changing the direction of wheels because they can perform 3-DOF motions on a plane. This paper presents a novel mobile robot design with steerable omnidirectional wheels. This robot can operate in either omnidirectional or differential drive modes, depending on the drive conditions. In the omnidirect...