Multirobot rendezvous with bearing-only or range-only measurements

Abstract

This paper studies distributed rendezvous strategies for multiple nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots with the aim of testing their practicality on real robots. We investigate control strategies which use just bearing-only or range-only measurements and do not need inter-robot radio communication to share the measurements. For the bearing-only case, two control laws proposed in our previous study are recalled and adapted. For the range-only case, rendezvous control laws for a two-robot system are proposed first and it is shown analytically a two-robot system achieves rendezvous globally under these control laws. Then the range-only-based control laws are extended to multirobot systems. Monte Carlo simulations indicate that a multirobot system achieves practical convergence under the range-only-based control laws. Experimental results illustrate the applicability and performance of the proposed control strategies for multiple wheeled-robot systems.