Abstract
Although robotic coverage and collision avoidance are active areas of robotics research, the avoidance of collision situations between robots has often been neglected in the context of multi-robot coverage tasks. In fact, for robots of physical size, collisions are likely to happen during deployment and coverage in densely packed multi-robot configurations. For this reason, we aim to motivate by this paper the combined use of multi-robot coverage and reciprocal collision avoidance. We present a taxonomy of collision scenarios in multi-robot coverage problems. In particular, coverage tasks with built-in heterogeneity such as multiple antagonistic objectives or robot constraints are shown to benefit from the combination. Based on our taxonomy, we evaluate four representative robotic use cases in simulation by combining the specific methods of Voronoi coverage and reciprocal velocity obstacles.
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Notes
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Under the linear programming formulation, the RVO method becomes the ORCA method.
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In our case, the Voronoi neighborhood can be used as neighborhood in the RVO computation.
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All the simulations have been conducted in the Matlab environment.
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Only a single collision occurred in a situation where a covering robot was jammed in between two non-cooperative robots that moved in opposite directions from and to the charging area.
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Acknowledgments
The work presented in this paper has been carried out at the Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Laboratory at EPFL. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013—Challenge 2—Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics—under grant agreement No 601033—MOnarCH.
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Breitenmoser, A., Martinoli, A. (2016). On Combining Multi-robot Coverage and Reciprocal Collision Avoidance. In: Chong, NY., Cho, YJ. (eds) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 112 . Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55879-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55879-8_4
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