Simultaneous Deployment and Tracking Multi-Robot Strategies with Connectivity Maintenance.

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Multi-agent systems
• Autonomous navigation

Background:

• Cooperative multi-robot systems, integrating ground and aerial vehicles, are increasingly vital for complex tasks.
• Effective area monitoring requires coordinated movement and persistent communication among robots.
• Existing strategies often struggle with maintaining connectivity during dynamic target tracking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose novel Lloyd-based tracking strategies for ground robots to follow aerial robots.
• To ensure continuous communication connectivity among ground robots during monitoring tasks.
• To evaluate the performance of these strategies in diverse simulated and real-world scenarios.

Main Methods:

• Development of two Lloyd-based tracking algorithms: one using environmental density functions and another dynamically adjusting workspace limits.
• Implementation of connectivity maintenance by restricting robot motion to preserve a minimum spanning tree of the communication graph.
• Extensive parametric studies and validation through realistic robotic simulations and physical experiments.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated effectiveness of both proposed strategies in enabling ground robots to track aerial targets.
• Successful maintenance of communication connectivity among ground robots throughout the monitoring tasks.
• Quantitative analysis of strategy performance under various environmental and operational parameters.

Conclusions:

• The proposed Lloyd-based tracking strategies offer a robust solution for coordinated multi-robot area monitoring.
• These methods effectively balance target tracking with essential communication link maintenance.
• The findings provide a valuable foundation for future research in heterogeneous multi-robot coordination.