Simultaneous Deployment and Tracking Multi-Robot Strategies with Connectivity Maintenance

TL;DR

This paper introduces two Lloyd-based strategies for multi-robot teams with ground and aerial vehicles to monitor an area while maintaining connectivity, validated through simulations and real experiments.

Contribution

It proposes novel Lloyd-based tracking strategies that adaptively focus on targets and maintain connectivity in multi-robot systems.

Findings

Strategies effectively track targets in simulated scenarios.

Connectivity is preserved via Minimum Spanning Tree constraints.

Methods are validated in real robotic experiments.

Abstract

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.