(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-06)
Smith, Brian Stephen; Egerstedt, Magnus B.; Howard, Ayanna M.
In this paper we present a collection of graph-based
methods for determining if a team of mobile robots, subjected
to sensor and communication range constraints, can persistently
achieve a specified formation. What we mean by this is that
the formation, once achieved, will be preserved by the direct
maintenance of the smallest subset of all possible pairwise inter-agent
distances. In this context, formations are defined by sets
of points separated by distances corresponding to desired inter-agent
distances. Further, we provide graph operations to describe
agent interactions that implement a given formation, as well as
an algorithm that, given a persistent formation, automatically
generates a sequence of such operations. Experimental results are
presented that illustrate the operation of the proposed methods
on real robot platforms.