Closed loop motion planning of cooperating mobile robots using graph connectivity
Section snippets
Previous work
The multi-robot motion planning problem has been addressed with centralized motion planners by a number of groups. The paths are constructed in the composite free configuration space [3]. This approach in general guarantees completeness but its complexity is exponential in the dimension of the composite configuration space [4]. Other groups have pursued decentralized approaches to motion planning. This generally involves two steps: (i) individual paths are planned
Problem definition
The basic multi-robot motion problem is to find a motion plan for all the robots in a group such that each robot reaches its goal while avoiding collisions with other robots and with the obstacles in the environment. We will extend this problem by defining the coordinated motion planning problem, where besides avoiding collisions the robots need to cooperate and maintain formation constraints in order to reach their goals.
Definition 1 Coordinated Motion Planning Problem Consider a world, , occupied by a set, , of robots. The th robot
Approach
In this paper we will solve the cooperative motion planning problem defined in Section 2 for a planar world and will focus our examples and experiments on sensing and/or communication constraints. However, it can be shown that the solution can be extended for other constraints induced by cooperation.
We consider a two-level motion planner where the superior level is able to specify a deliberative plan [8] in terms of previously computed navigation functions for each robot and desired
Flocking
The first group of experiments presented in this paper was performed with a team of holonomic robots. Each holonomic robot has three omnidirectional wheels mounted in a circular, cm radius, plexiglass platform as shown in Fig. 4. They do not have any local sensors or communication devices and are remotely controlled by a computer that relies on an overhead camera to localize the robots in the environment.
We want to control the holonomic robots to perform a task known as flocking [26]. In this
Conclusions and future work
We developed a suite of decentralized reactive controllers for the cooperative motion control of a group of mobile robots. Our approach is based on the online modification of pre-computed navigation functions in order to satisfy formation constraints. Proofs of convergence are presented in the case of holonomic robots. Although we have only presented here results with sensing and communication constraints, we have shown in previous work that the approach can be extended to other constraints
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by FAPEMIG and CNPq of Brazil, and DARPA of USA.
Guilherme Augusto Silva Pereira received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. Dr. Pereira received the Gold Medal Award from the Engineering School of UFMG for garnering first place among the Electrical Engineering students in 1998. He was, from November 2000 to May 2003, a Visiting Scientist at the General Robotics,
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Guilherme Augusto Silva Pereira received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. Dr. Pereira received the Gold Medal Award from the Engineering School of UFMG for garnering first place among the Electrical Engineering students in 1998. He was, from November 2000 to May 2003, a Visiting Scientist at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Since July 2004, he is an Assistant Professor of the Electrical Engineering Department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (DEE/UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he is the director of the Computer Systems and Robotics (CORO) Laboratory. His research interests include cooperative robotics, robot navigation, control engineering, computer vision, and distributed sensing. Dr. Pereira is a Member of Sociedade Brasileira de Automática.
Vijay Kumar is the UPS Foundation Professor and the Chairman of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania. He has a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer and Information Science. He has been on the Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania since 1987. He served as the Deputy Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2000–2004 and directed the GRASP Laboratory, a multidisciplinary robotics and perception laboratory, from 1998–2004.
Dr. Kumar is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, and the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. He is the recipient of the 1991 NSF Presidential Young Investigator award, the 1997 Freudenstein Award for significant accomplishments in mechanisms and robotics and the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Kawamori Best Paper Award. He is also a Distinguished Lecturer in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
Mario Fernando Montenegro Campos, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Computer Vision and Robotics in the Department of Computer Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He holds a B.S. degree in Engineering, and an M.S. in Computer Science, all from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include cooperative robotics, robot vision, sensor information processing. His main contributions are in haptics, multi-robot cooperation and robot vision. He is the founder and director of the Vision and Robotics Lab — VeRLab, UFMG, Brazil. He is a Distinguished Lecturer in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.