Cooperative Control of Networked Ground Robotic Vehicles
Ioannis E. Kantaros · 2012
The purpose of this thesis is to develop coordination schemes concerning the motion of robotic agents for area coverage purposes under RF communications constraints. The nodesperform motion in discrete time steps according to distributed information acquired from nodes which are connected at predefined number of hops until they reach optimum area configuration. Robots are supposed to be equipped with sensor for coverage purposes and with radio transceiver so as information to be transmitted. However, communication radius is not demanded to be at least equal to twice the sensing one, imposing an extra constraint in the overall problem.Coordination schemes are developed ensuring end-to-end RF connectivity of the network while attaining optimum area coverage.Results are further verified via simulations studies.