Composable communication constraint-based control

摘要

We describe a framework for multi-vehicle control which explicitly incorporates the state of the communication network and the constraints imposed by specifications on the quality of the communications links available to each robot. In a multi-robot adhoc setting, the need for guaranteed communications is essential for cooperative behavior. We propose a control methodology that ensures local connectivity in multi-robot navigation. Specifically, given an initial and final configuration of robots in which the quality of each communication link is above some specified threshold, we synthesize controllers that guarantee each robot goes to its goal destination while maintaining the quality of the communication links above the given threshold. For the sake of simplicity, we assume each robot has a pre-assigned "base unit" with which the robot tries to maintain connectivity while performing the assigned task. The proposed control methodology allows the robot's velocity to align with the tangent of a critical communication surface such that it might be possible for the robot to move on the surface. No assumptions are made regarding the critical surface, which might be arbitrarily complex for cluttered urban environments. The stability of such technique is shown and three-dimensional simulations with a small team of robots are presented. The paper demonstrates the performance of the control scheme in various three-dimensional settings with proofs of guarantees in simple scenarios.