Nav-SCOPE: Swarm Robot Cooperative Perception and Coordinated Navigation

TL;DR

Nav-SCOPE introduces a lightweight decentralized system enabling swarm robots to share perception data, reduce environmental uncertainties, and coordinate navigation effectively, demonstrated through simulations and real-world tests.

Contribution

It presents a novel, interpretable approach combining perception sharing, interaction fields, and path optimization for decentralized multi-robot navigation.

Findings

Reduced path redundancy in robot navigation

Robust performance across diverse tasks

Minimal computational and communication demands

Abstract

This paper proposes a lightweight systematic solution for multi-robot coordinated navigation with decentralized cooperative perception. An information flow is first created to facilitate real-time observation sharing over unreliable ad-hoc networks. Then, the environmental uncertainties of each robot are reduced by interaction fields that deliver complementary information. Finally, path optimization is achieved, enabling self-organized coordination with effective convergence, divergence, and collision avoidance. Our method is fully interpretable and ready for deployment without gaps. Comprehensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate reduced path redundancy, robust performance across various tasks, and minimal demands on computation and communication.