Biconnected Structure for Multi-Robot Systems
For many distributed autonomous robotic systems, it is important to
maintain communication connectivity among the robots. That is, each
robot must be able to communicate with each other robot, perhaps
through a series of other robots. Ideally, this property should be
robust to the removal of any single robot from the system. In this
work, we define a property of a team's communication graph that
ensures this property, called biconnectivity.
In previous work, we developed algorithms for multirobot surveillance
under the assumption that each pair of robots could communicate
directly. This communication assumption enabled the
robots to negotiate to achieve an efficient task division,
but it constrained us to small environments. This work is the first
attempt to extend these algorithms to larger environments.
We tackle this problem by dividing it into three main steps:
(1) Checking whether a team of robots is currently biconnected,
(2) Maintaining biconnectivity should a robot be removed from
(or added to) the team, and (3) Constructing a biconnected
multi-robot structure from scratch.
Our work for step 1 will be presented at DARS-2006 (paper info), and the work
for step 2 will be presented at AAAI-2006 (download paper).
RoboCup Rescue Simulation
I was one of the co-founders of the Arian RoboCup Rescue team (2001-2003),
along with Ali Nouri
and Dr. Jafar Habibi.
Arian in the three years of its existance won 2 RoboCup championships
in 2002 and 2003, and 1 second place in 2001. I was coordinator and designer
of the team through those three years; the team stopped attending competitions
after I moved to UT-Austin.
| | |
| |
| |