Robotica

Table of Contents - 2003 - Volume 21, Issue 05  

Local navigation strategies for a team of robots

Antonio  Sgorbissa a1 and Ronald C.  Arkin a2

a1 Laboratorium, DIST – University of Genova (Italy). antonio.sgorbissa@unige.it
a2 Mobile Robot Laboratory, College Of Computing – GaTech (USA). arkin@cc.gatech.edu

Abstract

Whenever a mobile robot has to deal with an environment that is totally or partially unknown or dynamically changing, local navigation strategies are very important for the robot to successfully achieve its goals. Unfortunately, local navigation algorithms that have been proposed in the literature offer poor performance (or even fail) whenever the geometry of the free space in which the robot is requested to operate increases its complexity. In this paper, we deal with a team composed of many robots, and we show how robots navigating within an unknown environment with local communication capabilities (only line-of-sight communication is allowed) can cooperate by helping each other to achieve their own goals.

(Received January 10 2003)


Key Words: Navigation algorithms; Multi-robot exploration; Multi-robot cooperation.