Coordinated teams of reactive mobile platforms

Presents techniques for exploiting redundancy in teams of mobile robots. In particular, we address tasks involving the kinematic coordination of several communicating robots. Teams area modeled as highly redundant spatial mechanisms for which multi-objective, concurrent controllers are constructed using a generalization of null-space control. The goal is to develop a methodology in which the robustness and error suppression in a control theoretic substrate can be used to preserve critical properties in teams of reactive robots. The resulting "safe" control options can then be explored while guaranteeing global compliance with system specifications. The proposed architecture depends on a set of concurrent, low-dimensional control processes that interact in a well-defined manner. Cascaded null space projections and coordination templates are used to manage control interactions across platforms that actively maintain constraints for pairs of robots. Pairwise policies can then be combined to represent coordinated, multi-robot tasks. To illustrate the approach, we demonstrate a distributed control that maintains critical connectivity in line-of-sight communication networks.