Showing papers by "Gonzalo López-Nicolás published in 2021"

A Practical Method to Cover Evenly a Dynamic Region With a Swarm

Abstract: Many applications require exploring or monitoring a region. This can be achieved by a sensor network, a large team of robots which can cover only a very small fraction each. When the region is convex, small, and static, it suffices to deploy the robots as a Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT). Instead, we consider that the area to cover is wide, not necessarily convex, and complex. Then, a smaller simple region is maneuvered and deformed to rake the full area. A few waypoints describing the region along time are provided to the robots. The goal is that the robots coordinate to dynamically deploy over this region evenly, near a CVT. Unfortunately, the distributed CVT computation algorithm converges too slowly for such exploration method to be practical. In this work, CVT computation is complemented with feedback and feedforward based control techniques, and dynamic consensus , to adjust the robot speeds so that they coordinate to cover the dynamic region. We demonstrate in simulation that the proposed method succeeds to achieve the goal of tracking the region, with the robots evenly deployed, while keeping the connectivity and avoiding collisions. We also compare the performance of the proposed method versus other alternatives.

Enclosing a moving target with an optimally rotated and scaled multiagent pattern

Abstract: We propose a novel control method to enclose a moving target in a two-dimensional setting with a team of agents forming a prescribed geometric pattern. The approach optimises a measure of the overa...

Distributed Linear Control of Multirobot Formations Organized in Triads

Abstract: This letter addresses the problem of controlling multiple robots to form a prescribed team shape in two-dimensional space. We consider a team organization in interlaced triads (i.e., groups of three robots). For each triad we define a measure of geometric deformation relative to its prescribed shape. Our main contribution is a novel distributed control law, defined as the gradient descent on the sum of these triangular deformation measures. We show that this geometrically motivated control law is linear, and bears analogies with existing formulations. Moreover, in comparison with these formulations our controller is simpler and more flexible to design, converges to the globally optimal shape by construction, and allows analysis of the team size dynamics. We illustrate the proposed approach in simulation.