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Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems pp 17–34Cite as

Consensus Control of Distributed Robots Using Direction of Arrival of  Wireless Signals

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Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 9))

Abstract

In multi-robot applications, consensus control and coordination are vital and potentially repetitive tasks. To circumvent practical limitations such as a global localization system, researchers have focused on bearing-based consensus controllers, but most assumed that measurements from sensors (e.g., vision) are noise-free. In this paper, we propose to use wireless signal measurements to estimate the direction of arrival (relative bearings) of neighboring robots and introduce a weighted bearing consensus controller to achieve coordinate-free distributed multi-robot rendezvous. We prove that the proposed controller guarantees connectivity maintenance and convergence even in the presence of measurement noise. We conduct extensive numerical simulation experiments using the Robotarium multi-robot platform to verify and demonstrate the properties of the proposed controller and to compare the performance of the rendezvous task against several state-of-the-art rendezvous controllers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Robotarium is a freely accessible remote multi-robot software and hardware testbed provided by Georgia Tech, available at https://www.robotarium.gatech.edu.

  2. 2.

    Available at https://github.com/SMARTlab-Purdue/robotarium-rendezvous-RSSDOA.

  3. 3.

    Note the problem can be adapted to higher dimensions (e.g. for aerial and underwater vehicles).

  4. 4.

    We assume RSS is measured in dBm as provided by most Wi-Fi manufacturers. However, to retain the exponential mapping of the signal power with distance, we convert the RSS in dBm to Watts using \(R (W) = E^{-3} 10^{[\frac{R(dBm)}{10}]}\) for use in our controller.

  5. 5.

    Details on the SOTA controllers and the results are shown in https://youtu.be/6BkFrJ8vceg.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30602, USA

    Ramviyas Parasuraman

  2. SMART Lab, Department of Computer and Information Technology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Ramviyas Parasuraman & Byung-Cheol Min

Authors
  1. Ramviyas Parasuraman
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  2. Byung-Cheol Min
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ramviyas Parasuraman .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Nikolaus Correll

  2. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Mac Schwager

  3. Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Michael Otte

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Parasuraman, R., Min, BC. (2019). Consensus Control of Distributed Robots Using Direction of Arrival of  Wireless Signals. In: Correll, N., Schwager, M., Otte, M. (eds) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05816-6_2

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