Resilient Flocking for Mobile Robot Teams

We present a method that enables resilient formation control for mobile robot teams in the presence of noncooperative (defective or malicious) robots. Recent results in network science define graph topological properties that guarantee resilience against faults and attacks on individual nodes in sta...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 2; no. 2; pp. 1039 - 1046
Main Authors: Saulnier, Kelsey, Saldana, David, Prorok, Amanda, Pappas, George J., Kumar, Vijay
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.04.2017
Subjects:
Communication networks
Distributed robot systems
Mobile robots
networked robots
Resilience
Robot kinematics
Robot sensing systems
Robustness
ISSN:2377-3766, 2377-3766
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We present a method that enables resilient formation control for mobile robot teams in the presence of noncooperative (defective or malicious) robots. Recent results in network science define graph topological properties that guarantee resilience against faults and attacks on individual nodes in static networks. We build on these results to propose a control policy that allows a team of mobile robots to achieve resilient consensus on the direction of motion. Our strategy relies on dynamic connectivity management that makes use of a metric that characterizes the robustness of the communication network topology. Our method distinguishes itself from prior work in that our connectivity management strategy ensures that the network lies above a critical resilience threshold, guaranteeing that the consensus algorithm always converges to a value within the range of the cooperative agents' initial values. We demonstrate the use of our framework for resilient flocking, and show simulation results with groups of holonomic mobile robots.
ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2017.2655142