Multi-robot Cooperative Control:From Theory to Practice
Sheng Zhao · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2010
In recent years, the research activities in the area of multi-robot systems have grown dramatically.Compared to single robot systems, the multi-robot systems are more robust, flexible, and efficient.However, controlling a multi-robot system is not trivial and involves several challenges including uncertainty, stability and scalability problems.This thesis makes two significant contributions to the multi-robot research: i) development of cooperative control algorithm based on a hydrodynamic model; ii) development of self-localization and tracking scheme in multi-robot system.In the first part, this thesis proposes a fluid model inspired cooperative control algorithm to control multiple robots.Since this approach takes the density of robots as an important control variable, it is given a name called density-based control.Two tasks have been implemented to demonstrate the efficiency of the density-based controller: group motion and shape control, and group segregation.In the second part, this thesis proposes a novel algorithm for self-localization and tracking in a multi-robot system that implements a non-pattern based method.In contrast to the traditional pattern-based localization systems, a localization method without using patterns can be more scalable to the number of robots and more efficient in computation.The efficiency of the non-pattern based self-localization scheme has been demonstrated with the help of extensive simulations and experiments.