Multiagent Rendezvous With Shortest Distance to Convex Regions With Empty Intersection: Algorithms and Experiments

This paper presents both algorithms and experimental results to solve a distributed rendezvous problem with shortest distance to convex regions. In a multiagent network, each agent is assigned to a certain convex region and has information about only its own region. All these regions might not have an intersection. Through local interaction with their neighbors, multiple agents collectively rendezvous at an optimal location that is a priori unknown to each agent and has the shortest total squared distance to these regions. First, a distributed time-varying algorithm is introduced, where a corresponding condition is given to guarantee that all agents rendezvous at the optimal location asymptotically for bounded convex regions. Then a distributed tracking algorithm combined with a distributed estimation algorithm is proposed. It is first shown that for general possibly unbounded convex regions, all agents rendezvous in finite time and then collectively slide to the optimal location asymptotically. Then it is shown that for convex regions with certain projection compressibility, all agents collectively rendezvous at the optimal location in finite time, even when the regions are time varying. The algorithms are experimentally implemented on multiple ground robots to illustrate the obtained theoretical results.