Holistic Connectivity Controller for Multirobot Dispersion

Dispersion of mobile robots in a certain formation is prerequisite in many applications; one of the most important issues during the entire process is to maintain the interagent connections, as well as to restore them whenever they were broken. We investigate the aforementioned problem in this work by designing a holistic connectivity controller (HCC) to regulate and restore the interagent connections during the dispersion of the mobile network. HCC consists of two core structures. Firstly, to illustrate the multirobot dispersion, we adopt the distributed link removal algorithm (DLRA), which is able to remove redundant links in the multirobot network to facilitate the dispersion and only requires local information of no more than two-hop neighbors. Secondly, the proposed approach is extended to the problem of connectivity restoration with consideration of simultaneous failure of multiple agents. A connectivity restoration strategy is proposed, and then the recoverability of network connectivity is investigated. The proposed HCC has also integrated motion controller to regulate the movement of the mobile robots, so that interrobot collisions can be effectively avoided. Theoretical analysis and computer simulations have confirmed the efficiency and scalability of the proposed schemes.