This paper proposes a novel data-driven control strategy for maintaining connectivity in networked multi-robot systems. Existing approaches often rely on a pre-determined communication model specifying whether pairwise robots can communicate given their relative distance to guide the connectivity-aware control design, which may not capture real-world communication conditions. To relax that assumption, we present the concept of Data-driven Connectivity Barrier Certificates, which utilize Control Barrier Functions (CBF) and Gaussian Processes (GP) to characterize the admissible control space for pairwise robots based on communication performance observed online. This allows robots to maintain a satisfying level of pairwise communication quality (measured by the received signal strength) while in motion. Then we propose a Data-driven Connectivity Maintenance (DCM) algorithm that combines (1) online learning of the communication signal strength and (2) a bi-level optimization-based control framework for the robot team to enforce global connectivity of the realistic multi-robot communication graph and minimally deviate from their task-related motions. We provide theoretical proofs to justify the properties of our algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness through simulations with up to 20 robots.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Inter-robot communication enables multi-robot systems to coordinate and execute complex missions efficiently. Thus, maintaining connectivity of the communication network between robots is essential for many multi-robot systems. In this paper, we present a trajectory planner for connectivity maintenance of a multi-robot system. We first define a weighted undirected graph to represent the connectivity of the system. Unlike previous connectivity maintenance works, we explicitly account for robot motion and sensing uncertainties while formulating the graph edge weights. These uncertainties result …
Connectivity maintenance plays a key role in achieving a desired global behavior among a swarm of robots. However, connectivity maintenance in realistic environments is hampered by lack of computation resources, low communication bandwidth, robot failures, and unstable links. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized connectivity-preserving algorithm that can be deployed on top of other behaviors to enforce connectivity constraints. The algorithm takes a set of targets to be reached while keeping a minimum number of redundant links between robots, with the goal of guaranteeing bandwidth …
In many cases the multi-robot systems are desired to execute simultaneously multiple behaviors with different controllers, and sequences of behaviors in real time, which we call \textit{behavior mixing}. Behavior mixing is accomplished when different subgroups of the overall robot team change their controllers to collectively achieve given tasks while maintaining connectivity within and across subgroups in one connected communication graph. In this paper, we present a provably minimum connectivity maintenance framework to ensure the subgroups and overall robot team stay connected at all times …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Communication connectivity is desirable for safe and efficient operation of multi-robot systems. While decentralized algorithms for connectivity maintenance have been explored in recent literature, the majority of these works do not account for robot motion and sensing uncertainties. These uncertainties are inherent in practical robots and result in robots deviating from their desired positions which could potentially result in a loss of connectivity. In this paper we present a Decentralized Connectivity Maintenance algorithm accounting for robot motion and sensing Uncertainties (DCMU). We fir…
Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）；Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón（阿拉贡工程研究所）
Multi robot teams composed by ground and aerial vehicles have gained attention during the last years. We present a scenario where both types of robots must monitor the same area from different view points. In this paper we propose two Lloyd-based tracking strategies to allow the ground robots (agents) follow the aerial ones (targets), keeping the connectivity between the agents. The first strategy establishes density functions on the environment so that the targets acquire more importance than other zones, while the second one iteratively modifies the virtual limits of the working area dependi…
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
In this paper, we consider a team of mobile robots executing simultaneously multiple behaviors by different subgroups, while maintaining global and subgroup line-of-sight (LOS) network connectivity that minimally constrains the original multi-robot behaviors. The LOS connectivity between pairwise robots is preserved when two robots stay within the limited communication range and their LOS remains occlusion-free from static obstacles while moving. By using control barrier functions (CBF) and minimum volume enclosing ellipsoids (MVEE), we first introduce the LOS connectivity barrier certificate …
Jacobs University Bremen（不来梅雅各布大学）；University of Cassino and Southern Lazio（卡西诺和南拉齐奥大学）
The problem of maintaining a wireless communication link between a fixed base station and an autonomous agent by means of a team of mobile robots is addressed in this work. Such problem can be of interest for search and rescue missions in post disaster scenario where the autonomous agent can be used for remote monitoring and first hand knowledge of the aftermath, while the mobile robots can be used to provide the agent the possibility to dynamically send its collected information to an external base station. To study the problem, a distributed multi-robot system with wifi communication capabil…
Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔综合理工大学）；European Space Agency（欧洲空间局）；Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Redundancy and parallelism make decentralized multi-robot systems appealing solutions for the exploration of extreme environments. However, effective cooperation often requires team-wide connectivity and a carefully designed communication strategy. Several recently proposed decentralized connectivity maintenance approaches exploit elegant algebraic results drawn from spectral graph theory. Yet, these proposals are rarely taken beyond simulations or laboratory implementations. In this work, we present two major contributions: (i) we describe the full-stack implementation---from hardware to soft…
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）；Instituto Tecnológico Vale（淡水河谷技术研究所）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC（西班牙高等科学研究委员会-加泰罗尼亚理工大学机器人与工业信息研究所）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Communication is an important capability for multi-robot exploration because (1) inter-robot communication (comms) improves coverage efficiency and (2) robot-to-base comms improves situational awareness. Exploring comms-restricted (e.g., subterranean) environments requires a multi-robot system to tolerate and anticipate intermittent connectivity, and to carefully consider comms requirements, otherwise mission-critical data may be lost. In this paper, we describe and analyze ACHORD (Autonomous & Collaborative High-Bandwidth Operations with Radio Droppables), a multi-layer networking solution wh…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）
Submodular maximization has been widely used in many multi-robot task planning problems including information gathering, exploration, and target tracking. However, the interplay between submodular maximization and communication is rarely explored in the multi-robot setting. In many cases, maximizing the submodular objective may drive the robots in a way so as to disconnect the communication network. Driven by such observations, in this paper, we consider the problem of maximizing submodular function with connectivity constraints. Specifically, we propose a problem called Communication-aware Su…
CoCoPlan: Adaptive Coordination and Communication for Multi-robot Systems in Dynamic and Unknown Environments
School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Peking University（北京大学先进制造与机器人学院）；Division of Natural and Applied Sciences, Duke Kunshan University（杜克昆山大学自然与应用科学系）
Polytechnique Montreal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；École de Technologie Supérieure（高等技术学院）
The coordination of robot swarms - large decentralized teams of robots - generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments. Unstructured environments, limited computational resources, low bandwidth, and robot failures all contribute to the complexity of connectivity maintenance. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight algorithm to navigate a group of robots in complex environments while maintaining connectivity by building a chain of robots. The algorithm is robust to single robot …
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）；École Polytechnique de Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）
Connectivity maintenance is crucial for the real world deployment of multi-robot systems, as it ultimately allows the robots to communicate, coordinate and perform tasks in a collaborative way. A connectivity maintenance controller must keep the multi-robot system connected independently from the system's mission and in the presence of undesired real world effects such as communication delays, model errors, and computational time delays, among others. In this paper we present the implementation, on a real robotic setup, of a connectivity maintenance control strategy based on Control Barrier Fu…
In this paper, we consider the dynamic multi-robot distribution problem where a heterogeneous group of networked robots is tasked to spread out and simultaneously move towards multiple moving task areas while maintaining connectivity. The heterogeneity of the system is characterized by various categories of units and each robot carries different numbers of units per category representing heterogeneous capabilities. Every task area with different importance demands a total number of units contributed by all of the robots within its area. Moreover, we assume the importance and the total number o…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Drexel University（德雷塞尔大学）
We study the problem that requires a team of robots to perform joint localization and target tracking task while ensuring team connectivity and collision avoidance. The problem can be formalized as a nonlinear, non-convex optimization program, which is typically hard to solve. To this end, we design a two-staged approach that utilizes a greedy algorithm to optimize the joint localization and target tracking performance and applies control barrier functions to ensure safety constraints, i.e., maintaining connectivity of the robot team and preventing inter-robot collisions. Simulated Gazebo expe…
Robust Geospatial Coordination of Multi-Agent Communications Networks Under Attrition
Advanced Technology Center, Lockheed Martin Space（洛克希德·马丁航天公司先进技术中心）；Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学傅氏基金工程与应用科学学院）；Lockheed Martin AI Center, Lockheed Martin Corporation（洛克希德·马丁公司人工智能中心）；Barnard College, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学巴纳德学院）；Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院）
The problem of multi-robot navigation of connectivity maintenance is challenging in multi-robot applications. This work investigates how to navigate a multi-robot team in unknown environments while maintaining connectivity. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to develop a decentralized policy, which is shared among multiple robots. Given range sensor measurements and the positions of other robots, the policy aims to generate control commands for navigation and preserve the global connectivity of the robot team. We incorporate connectivity concerns into the RL framework as constra…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳与雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Connectivity maintenance is an essential aspect to consider while controlling a multi-robot system. In general, a multi-robot system should be connected to obtain a certain common objective. Connectivity must be kept regardless of the control strategy or the objective of the multi-robot system. Two main methods exist for connectivity maintenance: keep the initial connections (local connectivity) or allow modifications to the initial connections, but always keeping the overall system connected (global connectivity). In this paper we present a method that allows, at the same time, to maintain gl…
Compositional barrier functions are proposed in this paper to systematically compose multiple objectives for teams of mobile robots. The objectives are first encoded as barrier functions, and then composed using AND and OR logical operators. The advantage of this approach is that compositional barrier functions can provably guarantee the simultaneous satisfaction of all composed objectives. The compositional barrier functions are applied to the example of ensuring collision avoidance and static/dynamical graph connectivity of teams of mobile robots. The resulting composite safety and connectiv…
Realm: Real-Time Line-of-Sight Maintenance in Multi-Robot Navigation with Unknown Obstacles
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）；Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局信息通信研究所）；School of Automation, Chongqing University（重庆大学自动化学院）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Department of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术系）
This paper shows how Graph Neural Networks can be used for learning distributed coordination mechanisms in connected teams of robots. We capture the relational aspect of robot coordination by modeling the robot team as a graph, where each robot is a node, and edges represent communication links. During training, robots learn how to pass messages and update internal states, so that a target behavior is reached. As a proxy for more complex problems, this short paper considers the problem where each robot must locally estimate the algebraic connectivity of the team's network topology.
Multi-UAV Deployment in Obstacle-Cluttered Environments with LOS Connectivity
Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Peking University（力学与工程科学系，工程学院，北京大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
