969 research outputs found
Simultaneous Deployment and Tracking Multi-Robot Strategies with Connectivity Maintenance
Multi robot teams composed by ground and aerial vehicles have gained
attention during the last years. We present a scenario where both types of
robots must monitor the same area from different view points. In this paper we
propose two Lloyd-based tracking strategies to allow the ground robots (agents)
follow the aerial ones (targets), keeping the connectivity between the agents.
The first strategy establishes density functions on the environment so that the
targets acquire more importance than other zones, while the second one
iteratively modifies the virtual limits of the working area depending on the
positions of the targets. We consider the connectivity maintenance due to the
fact that coverage tasks tend to spread the agents as much as possible, which
is addressed by restricting their motions so that they keep the links of a
Minimum Spanning Tree of the communication graph. We provide a thorough
parametric study of the performance of the proposed strategies under several
simulated scenarios. In addition, the methods are implemented and tested using
realistic robotic simulation environments and real experiments
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