Distributed Cooperative Control for Optimal Deployment of Networked Mobile Robots

Networked mobile robots have a great potential in military and industrial applications.In practice, networked mobile robots are often required to autonomously deploythemselves in a region of interest to execute distributed sensing tasks such as searchand rescue, environment surveillance, and forest fire monitoring. An important yetchallenging problem arising from such tasks is the so-called multi-robot deploymentproblem, that is, to design distributed cooperative control laws for mobile robots suchthat they finally reach an optimal configuration with respect to a given performancemetric. During the past decade, considerable effort has been devoted to cooperativecontrol for multi-robot deployment and significant progress has been made. However,recent literature review reveals that study on multi-robot deployment is still in its earlystage of development. Many critical issues on deployment of networked mobile robots inreal-world applications remain to be investigated. These issues include heterogeneity ofmobile robots, limited interaction/communication range, complex environments, andcommunication constraints. These issues, if not well addressed, will significantly degradethe deployment performance of networked mobile robots, or even worse, lead to thefailure of multi-robot deployment in real-world applications. This project, by addressingthese issues, will investigate and develop novel approaches to distributed cooperativecontrol for deployment of networked heterogeneous mobile robots. In particular, thisproject will focus on the issues of connectivity preservation, environments with varyingroughness, and variety of communication constraints. The outcome of this project isexpected to enrich theoretical foundation of cooperative control for multi-robotdeployment, and moreover, the proposed approaches will provide control engineers withmore solid analysis and design tools for autonomously deploying mobile robots in real-worldapplications.