Distributed Dynamic Density Coverage for Human-Swarm Interactions

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Date
2015-07Author
Diaz-Mercado, Yancy
Lee, Sung G.
Egerstedt, Magnus B.
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Show full item recordAbstract
This paper presents two approaches to externally
influence a team of robots by means of time-varying
density functions. These density functions represent rough
references for where the robots should be located. Recently
developed continuous-time algorithms move the robots so
as to provide optimal coverage of a given the time-varying
density functions. This makes it possible for a human
operator to abstract away the number of robots and
focus on the general behavior of the team of robots as a
whole. Using a distributed approximation to this algorithm
whereby the robots only need to access information from
adjacent robots allows these algorithms to scale well with
the number of robots. Simulations and robotic experiments
show that the desired behaviors are achieved.