Deployment of Multi-robot Systems under the Nonholonomic Constraint

This paper introduces a novel distributed algorithm for deploying multi-robot systems, consisting of mobile robots with limited onboard sensing and wireless communication ranges, to approach the desired sensory coverage over targeted environments while maintaining communication connections. A virtual potential energy is defined for each mobile robot according to the difference between the actual and desired configurations in the neighborhood of the robot, which generates the actuating force to move the robot towards the desired local coverage. The Rayleigh's dissipation function is adopted to provide the necessary damping mechanism which maintains the stability of the deployment motion for each robot. The equation of deployment motion for each mobile robot is then derived from the Hamilton's principle using the method of the variational calculus, which efficiently incorporates the nonholonomic constraint arising in wheeled robots. The proposed algorithm decentralizes the multi-robot deployment problem into the motion control of individual robots. Simulation results show the feasibility of the proposed approach in guiding multi-robot deployment.