Optimizing communication in air-ground robot networks using decentralized control
Name
gilICRA2010.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
954.73 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
35781b68011bc025e2523cd337c26696
Author(s)
Gil, Stephanie
Schwager, Mac
Julian, Brian J
Rus, Daniela
Date Issued
May 2010
Publisher
IEEE
Citation
Gil, Stephanie, Schwager, Mac, Julian, Brian J and Rus, Daniela. 2010. "Optimizing communication in air-ground robot networks using decentralized control."
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We develop a distributed controller to position a team of aerial vehicles in a configuration that optimizes communication-link quality, to support a team of ground vehicles performing a collaborative task.We propose a gradient-based control approach where agents' positions locally minimize a physically motivated cost function. The contributions of this paper are threefold. We formulate of a cost function that incorporates a continuous, physical model of signal quality, SIR. We develop a non-smooth gradient-based controller that positions aerial vehicles to acheive optimized signal quality amongst all vehicles in the system. This controller is provably convergent while allowing for non-differentiability due to agents moving in or out of communication with one another. Lastly, we guarantee that given certain initial conditions or certain values of the control parameters, aerial vehicles will never disconnect the connectivity graph. We demonstrate our controller on hardware experiments using AscTec Hummingbird quadrotors and provide aggregate results over 10 trials. We also provide hardware-in-the-loop and MATALB simulation results, which demonstrate positioning of the aerial vehicles to minimize the cost function H and improve signal-quality amongst all communication links in the ground/air robot team. ©2010 IEEE.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Lincoln Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1109/robot.2010.5509622
