Abstract
We introduce a distributed finite element algorithm that allows swarms of mobile robots to persistently monitor environmental quantities such as temperature or salinity. The robots deploy themselves into the environment, covering the domain and dividing it into nonoverlapping regions. Each robot estimates the environment over its own region using local measurements and communication with nearby robots. The algorithm ensures that each robot's estimate constitutes a piece of a global estimate that spans the entire domain, fuses the whole swarm's measurements, and accounts for the spatial correlation between measurement and estimation locations. By incorporating spatial correlation without requiring the transmission of measurements or measurement locations, the algorithm decouples its communication requirements from the spatial statistics of the environment and enables robots with fixed capabilities to monitor environments with different spatial correlation lengths. Analysis and simulation demonstrate that, as the number of robots increases, the memory and communication requirements of each individual robot decrease until reaching a minimum, after which the resolution of the environmental model increases. Additional robots, therefore, add computational resources to the swarm rather than introducing extra computational burdens.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 8850212 |
| Pages (from-to) | 380-398 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Robotics |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2020 |
Funding
Manuscript received May 14, 2019; accepted July 21, 2019. Date of publication September 26, 2019; date of current version April 2, 2020. This article was recommended for publication by Editor I.-M. Chen upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Lab under Grant N00014-13-1-0331. (Corresponding author: Matthew Elwin.) The authors are with the Center for Robotics and Biosystems, the Department of Mechanical Engineering (Elwin and Lynch), the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (Freeman and Lynch), and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Freeman), Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208 USA (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]. edu; [email protected]).
Keywords
- Distributed robot systems
- environment monitoring and management
- networked robots
- sensor networks
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Computer Science Applications
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering