A coordination framework for weakly centralized mobile robot teams

In this paper, we describe a coordination framework for weakly centralized mobile robot teams in which the leader is not specified a priori, but it is selected dynamically during the mission depending on the task and the environment. The key to our approach is the integration of both centralized and decentralized coordination strategies at the individual robot level. Each robot relies on the local sensory system and makes decisions on the role selection as well as the best control for a given task. This allows the robots to reconfigure the formation dynamically in the presence of obstacles or other uncertainties in the environment. In addition, since the coordination decisions can be decentralized, our framework can be naturally scaled to groups of tens and hundreds of robots. We applied the framework on teams of two-wheeled differential driven mobile robot systems and consistent system behaviors observed from both numerical simulations and experimental results.