Cooperative leader following in a distributed multi-robot system

Abstract

The cooperative leader following task for multi-robot teams is introduced and discussed. We describe the design and implementation of a distributed technique to coordinate team level and robot level behaviors for this task, as well as a multi-threaded framework for the implementation of a multi-robot system with heterogeneous sensing capabilities. This approach enables robots to remain in formation as they deal with other obstacles that may appear within the formation. We describe how single robot behaviors are realized and scheduled. We show some of the results of the team implementations. The proposed approach has been run and validated on a team of robots performing both in indoor and outdoor environments.