LOST: localization-space trails for robot teams

Abstract-We describe Localization-Space Trails (LOST), a method that enables a team of robots to navigate between places of interest in an initially unknown environment using a trail of landmarks. The landmarks are not physical; they are waypoint coordinates generated on-line by each robot and shared with team-mates. Waypoints are specified in each robot's local coordinate system, and contain references to features in the world that are relevant to the team's task and common to all robots. Using these task-level references, robots can share waypoints without maintaining a global coordinate system. The method is tested in a series of real-world multi-robot experiments. The results demonstrate that the method (i) copes with accumulating odometry error; (ii) is robust to the failure of individual robots; (iii) converges to the best route discovered by any robot in the team. In one experiment, a team of four autonomous mobile robots performs a resource transportation task in our ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TROB
• Authors: Richard T. Vaughan, Kasper Støy, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Maja J. Mataric
• Keywords: Local Coordinate, Robots, Trail, TROB 2002