Modular Robot Formation and Routing for Resilient Consensus

Abstract

We consider a team of mobile robots with limited communication range tasked to coordinate in large environments. The robots need to maximize the covered area and achieve consensus in the presence of non-cooperative robots. Existing works in robot networks showed that a team can achieve resilient consensus by maintaining an r-robust communication network. However, the communication range of each robot needs to be large to satisfy the conditions of r-robustness. This paper relaxes this requirement on the communication range by leveraging the robot motion. Specifically, we design modular dynamic formations where subsets of robots move along simple closed curves. These modules can be linked together to assemble larger formations. We derive conditions based on periodic robot connections for individual and interconnected modules. We present module designs that satisfy the sufficient conditions in a lattice space. Simulations are provided to support our theoretical results.