Collision avoidance for persistent monitoring in multi-robot systems with intersecting trajectories

• Main Authors: Soltero, Daniel Eduardo (Contributor), Smith, Stephen L. (Author), Rus, Daniela L. (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Engineering (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2012-09-04T19:03:00Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 Persistent robot tasks such as monitoring and cleaning are concerned with controlling mobile robots to act in a changing environment in a way that guarantees that the uncertainty in the system (due to change and to the actions of the robot) remains bounded for all time. Prior work in persistent robot tasks considered only robot systems with collision-free paths that move following speed controllers. In this paper we describe a solution to multi-robot persistent monitoring, where robots have intersecting trajectories. We develop collision and deadlock avoidance algorithms that are based on stopping policies, and quantify the impact of the stopping times on the overall stability of the speed controllers.