Distributed Sensing and Cooperating Control for Swarms of Robotic vehicles

摘要

We discuss an approach to effectively control a large swarm of autonomous, robotic vehicles, as they perform a search and tag operation. In particular, the robotic agents are to find the source of a chemical plume. The robotic agents work together through distributed sensing and cooperative control. Distributed sensing is achieved through each agent sampling and sharing his information with others. Cooperative control is accomplished by each agent using its neighbors information to determine an update strategy. There is currently considerable interest in expanding the role of robotic vehicles in surveillance and inspection; searching, following and tagging and locating and identifying targets. In particular, researchers are beginning to focus on using small autonomous robotic vehicles for these tasks. This focus has been brought about largely because of the many recent advances in microelectronics and sensors, which include small, low power, CCD cameras; small microprocessors with expanded capabilities; autonomous navigation systems using GPS; and severed types of small sensors. It seems likely that these technological advances will lead to inexpensive, easy to fabricate, autonomous vehicles outfitted with an array of sensors. This, in turn, will allow researchers to consider teams, or even swarms, of these agents to perform a particular task.