Time Scales and Stability in Networked Multi-Robot Systems
This paper examines the dynamic interplay between decentralized controllers and mesh networking protocols for controlling groups of robots. A proportional controller is used to maintain robots in a formation based on estimates of the robots’ states observed through the network. The state information is propagated through the network using a flooding algorithm, which introduces topology-dependent time delays. The coupled interaction of information flow over the network with the dynamics of the robots is modeled as a linear dynamical system. With this model it is shown that systems made up of robots with stable first order dynamics are stable for all network update times, positive feedback gains, and connected communication graphs. With higher order robot dynamics it is found that stability is a complex and counter intuitive function of feedback gain and network update time. A performance metric is proposed for analyzing the convergence rate of the multi-robot system. Experiments with flying quadrotor robots verify the predictions of the model and the performance metric.
Mac Schwager Nathan Michael Vijay Kumar Daniela Rus
GRASP Lab,University of Pennsylvania,Philadelphia,PA 19106 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL),MIT,Cambridge,MA 02139,USA
国际会议
2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation(2011年IEEE世界机器人与自动化大会 ICRA 2011)
上海
英文
3855-3862
2011-05-09（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）