Distributed reactive motion control for dense cooperative sweep coverage of corridor environments by swarms of non-holonomic robots

摘要

Dubins-car like robots with limited control ranges have to autonomously form the densest net across a corridor environment, then to keep this formation, and to sweep the corridor with a given speed. The robots do not communicate with anybody, cannot distinguish between the partners, cannot play distinct roles in the team, and are unaware of the team size or corridor width. Every robot has access to the relative coordinates of the objects within a finite sensing range and measures its own speed. It is shown that the mission can be fully solved by a lower-level, continuous-time, and computationally inexpensive distributed control law. The proposed controller is common for all robots, individually operates at any of them and is reactive, i.e. it directly converts the current sensory data into the current control in a reflex-like fashion. The performance of the navigation algorithms is justified via a mathematically rigorous non-local convergence result for the corridors with straight parallel walls and is demonstrated via computer simulation tests in more complicated cases.