A Multi-Robot Control Architecture for Fault-Tolerant Sensor-Based Coverage (original) (raw)

Abstract

Sensor-based coverage problems have many applications such as patrolling, search-rescue, and surveillance. Using multi-robot team increases efficiency by reducing completion time of a sensor-based coverage task. Robustness to robot failures is another advantage of using multiple robots for coverage. Although there are many works to increase the efficiency of coverage methods, there are few works related to robot failures in the literature. In this paper, fault-tolerant control architecture is proposed for sensor-based coverage. Robot failures are detected using the heartbeat strategy. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments are conducted using P3-DX mobile robots both in laboratory and simulation environment. INTECH, Croatia, downloaded from SCIYO.COM problem, CARP-based planning algorithm is used in the PA of the architecture.Other types of planning algorithms may also be used for planning. Besides, other multi-robot missions such as object handling and transportation, serving patients and elderly in hospitals, etc. can easily be implemented by using the proposed robot control architecture. In this study, it is assumed that the communication network is fully connected. This assumption results in a polynomial increase of communication delay as the number of robots increases. Therefore, a wise communication strategy to reduce the time delay should be used. For instance, one robot may only communicate with the nearest partner while the whole communication network is kept to be connected. In the future studies, the authors plan to search the literature for communication topology and time delay, and use a proper communication strategy to reduce the communication delays.

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