Sonia Martínez
Jacobs Faculty Scholar
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Limited Range, Spatial Load Balancing for Multiple Robots
Beth Boardman, Troy Harden, and Sonia MartÃnez
Proceedings of the 2017 American Control Conference, Seattle, WA, USA, May 2017
Abstract:
This paper generalizes a spatial load balancing deployment problem for multiple robots in convex environments to handle limited range agent constraints. Here, limited range is understood as imposing a reachability condition or limitation on the distance that an agent can move. The limited range helps in forming a distributed algorithm that restricts the neighbors of an agent. To account for limited ranges, two different cost functions are considered for minimization subject to a variable area constraint. This area constraint leads to a sub-partition of the environment which is dependent on a set of weights and is invariant under translation of the weights. For a fixed sub-partition, an agent position update law is given to decrease the corresponding cost function. Building on the update laws, a class of distributed algorithms are proposed to solve the limited range spatial load balancing problem. We present a result that shows convergence of the algorithm for the area-only cost function. Finally, we include simulations that show the convergent behavior of the algorithms for both cost functions.
File: main.pdf
Bib-tex entry:
@InProceedings{BB-TH-SM:17-acc},
author = {B. Boardman and T. Harden and
S. Mart{\'\i}nez},
booktitle = {2017 American Control Conference},
title = {Limited Range, Spatial Load Balancing for Multiple
Robots},
month = {May},
year = {2017},
address ={Seattle, WA},
note= {To appear}
}