Abstract
We present a collaborative team of two under-actuated autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) that performs a cooperative navigation task while satisfying a communication constraint. Our approach is based on the use of a hierarchical control structure where a supervisory module commands each vessel to perform prioritized elementary tasks, a behavior-based controller generates motion directives to achieve the assigned tasks, and a maneuvering controller generates the actuator commands to follow the motion directives. The control technique has been tested in a mission where a set of target locations spread across a planar environment has to be visited once by either of the two ASVs while maintaining a relative separation less than a given maximum distance (to guarantee inter-ASV wireless communication). Experiments were carried out in the field with a team of two ASVs visiting 22 locations on a lake surface (approximately 30000m 2) with static obstacles. Results show a 30% improvement in mission time over the single-robot case.
This work was supported in part by the NOAA MERHAB program under grant NA05NOS4781228, by NSF as part of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) under grant CCR-0120778, by NSF grants CNS-0520305, CNS-0325875 and CNS-0540420, by the ONR MURI program under grant N00014-08-1-0693, and a gift from the Okawa Foundation.
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Arrichiello, F., Das, J., Heidarsson, H., Pereira, A., Chiaverini, S., Sukhatme, G.S. (2010). Multi-Robot Collaboration with Range-Limited Communication: Experiments with Two Underactuated ASVs. In: Howard, A., Iagnemma, K., Kelly, A. (eds) Field and Service Robotics. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 62. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13408-1_40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13408-1_40
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