Source localization on multi-robot systems

Abstract

Mobile robots have been utilized and have assisted humans for decades. In recent years, even groups of robots have been used for specific tasks that require the control of each robot and the distribution of commands. Using groups of robots generally requires complex control structures to ensure the safety and performance of groups completing a mission. This work presents control structures for tasks such as source localization, formation control, position tracking, collision avoidance, and synthesis of an according controller. The stability of the system is examined. The mission objective of source localization and itsextension to global source localization is introduced and tackled using different algorithms. The work concludes with the implementation of a robot platform along with simulation and experimental results to show the performance of the presented methods. The main findings include the proposal of a synthesis problem for source localization with formation control, a methodology that allows the calculation of the maximum permitted delay in a multi-robot system, and implementation for source localization in an unknown indoor environment.