Distributed Robot Ensemble Control for Deployment to Multiple Sites

Abstract

We address the ensemble synthesis of distributed control policies to allocate a team of homogenous robots to a collection of spatially distributed tasks. We assume individual robot controllers are derived via the sequential composition of individual task controllers and develop an appropriate macroscopic description of the team dynamics. A feedback control strategy is synthesized using the macroscopic model to enable the team to maintain a desired distribution of robots across the various tasks by controlling the mean and the variance of the robot population at each task. We present a distributed implementation of the proposed ensemble feedback strategy with minimal communication requirements. We establish stability properties of our ensemble controller and verify the feasibility of the distributed ensemble controller through high-fidelity simulations.