Several nonholonomic Dubins-car like robots travel over paths with bounded curvatures in a plane that contains an a priori unknown region. The robots are anonymous to one another and do not use communication facilities. Any of them has access to the current minimum distance to the region and can determine the relative positions and orientations of the other robots within a finite and given visibility range. We present a distributed navigation and guidance strategy under which every robot autonomously converges to the desired minimum distance to the region with always respecting a given safety margin, the robots do not collide with one another and do not get into clusters, and the entire team ultimately sweeps over the respective equidistant curve at a speed exceeding a given threshold, thus forming a kind of a sweeping barrier at the perimeter of the region. Moreover, this strategy provides effective sub-uniform distribution of the robots over the equidistant curve. Mathematically rigorous justification of th
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to) 1816-1844
Number of pages29
JournalRobotica
Volume35
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017

    Research areas

  • Robot navigation, Sensor-based control, Multi-agent systems, Decentralized control, Sweep barrier coverage

ID: 7612499