Distributed Artificial Potential Field Approach for Swarm Robots Sensing Deployment

Abstract

In recent years, the deployment control of multi-agent systems has gained a lot of attention. Creating an attractive and repulsive force with an artificial potential field (APF) is one of the most often utilized techniques for arranging the agents into an equilibrium configuration. Large-scale homogenous robot deployment in planar areas is proposed in this paper using a distributed APF approach. Our framework addresses situations where the group of robots needs to spread out to maximize the coverage area and enforces the restriction that the robots form a fully connected triangular lattice network. The main idea is the deployment method inspired by the distributed Morse potential field. However, instead of directly controlling the robot velocity by employing the gradient of the potential field, the desired position based on the neighbor's localization is generated. Due to the implementation of a position controller, the method is compatible with any conventional navigation strategy when the environment is given. The framework continuously reconfigures the robot's desired position to prevent an unreliable or suboptimal network. The deployment method is evaluated by the coverage metric and mean nearest-neighbor distance metric. The compatibility with navigation systems to deploy robots in non-convex environments is also proved.