Getting Mobile Autonomous Robots to Rendezvous

Abstract

Imagine n mobile robots, i.e., rovers, moving in the plane without human supervision. In addition to a motor drive, each robot has onboard a computer and a camera with which it can see the positions of some others relative to itself. The robots are assumed not to possess a common coordinate system—they don’t have GPS receivers, and there are no landmarks in view of all. Also, they are unable to communicate with each other. So it’s problematic if they can meet at a common location by distributed control strategies alone. This is called the rendezvous problem. Why take rendezvous to be the task? There are undoubtedly real situations where rendezvous is a goal: The robots should gather for servicing or recharging. In any event, rendezvous is the most basic formation task. It also arises in the notion of consensus[6]: A group of autonomous and distributed automata should come to agree on a piece of information.