IEEE Trans Cybern. 2018 May;48(5):1577-1590. doi: 10.1109/TCYB.2017.2708321. Epub 2017 Jun 8.
This paper is concerned with the collective behaviors of robots beyond the nearest neighbor rules, i.e., dispersion and flocking, when robots interact with others by applying an acute angle test (AAT)-based interaction rule. Different from a conventional nearest neighbor rule or its variations, the AAT-based interaction rule allows interactions with some far-neighbors and excludes unnecessary nearest neighbors. The resulting dispersion and flocking hold the advantages of scalability, connectivity, robustness, and effective area coverage. For the dispersion, a spring-like controller is proposed to achieve collision-free coordination. With switching topology, a new fixed-time consensus-based energy function is developed to guarantee the system stability. An upper bound of settling time for energy consensus is obtained, and a uniform time interval is accordingly set so that energy distribution is conducted in a fair manner. For the flocking, based on a class of generalized potential functions taking nonsmooth switching into account, a new controller is proposed to ensure that the same velocity for all robots is eventually reached. A co-optimizing problem is further investigated to accomplish additional tasks, such as enhancing communication performance, while maintaining the collective behaviors of mobile robots. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the theoretical results.
本文研究了机器人在采用基于锐角测试（AAT）的相互作用规则与他人相互作用时的集体行为，超越了最近邻规则，即分散和聚集。与传统的最近邻规则或其变体不同，基于 AAT 的相互作用规则允许与一些远邻进行相互作用，并排除不必要的最近邻。由此产生的分散和聚集具有可扩展性、连通性、鲁棒性和有效区域覆盖的优点。对于分散，提出了一个弹簧状控制器来实现无碰撞协调。通过切换拓扑结构，开发了一种新的基于固定时间一致性的能量函数，以保证系统的稳定性。获得了能量一致性的 settling 时间上限，并相应地设置了均匀的时间间隔，以使能量分配公平进行。对于聚集，基于考虑非光滑切换的一类广义势能函数，提出了一种新的控制器，以确保所有机器人最终达到相同的速度。进一步研究了一个协同优化问题，以完成额外的任务，例如增强通信性能，同时保持移动机器人的集体行为。给出了仿真结果，以验证理论结果的有效性。
