Study On Cloud Computing Based Multi-robot Formation Strategy

With the development of science and technology,robot technology has been matured and had a profound impact on human society.Compared to single robot,multi-robot system has stronger robustness and efficiency to complete complex tasks and attracted researchers' attention.As the foundation of the multi-robot system,formation control is the methodology that is applied to make multi-robot systems maintain target formation and avoid obstacles while sailing to the destination.The research involves many areas of multi-robot such as:localization,control strategy,path planning and wireless communication.To ensure that the robot formation can sail in the unknown environment,it's necessary to gather large amounts of environmental information through sensors and to process the gathered data.Restricted by capacity of onboard device,traditional robot has low computational efficiency and poor real-time capability.However,cloud robotics provides a new idea to solve the problem.Cloud robotics is a combination of cloud computing and robotics which transfer complex computing tasks to cloud and take advantage of cloud computing to provide powerful operation capacity to robot.This thesis focus on combination of cloud computing and formation in order to reduce robot's dependence on hardware and raise efficiency of multi-robot system.The main content of this paper includes two parts:the strategy of formation control and cloud robotics system.At the first part,by combining an artificial potential field,a leader-follower method is presented to make the multi-robot system work in cluttered environment.In the second part,a cloud robot system is constructed based on AmigoBot and China telecom cloud host.In this system,the architecture of C/S is implemented to complete formation control.As client robots will concentrate on environment information collection and task execution.As sever the cloud host on the one hand processes the collected data,on the other hand runs the formation algorithm and makes motion planning.Communication between robots and cloud host is based on TCP/IP to improve stability and prevent data loss.Firstly,the thesis introduces research significance of multi-robot system and cloud robotics,summarizes research results on domestic and foreign,then sketches out some basic concepts and classical algorithms of formation.Secondly,a leader-follower method with artificial potential field is presented for formation.Moreover,to eliminate trajectory dither of formation,an improved algorithm is designed to guarantee smooth formation motion trajectory.Thirdly,the working module of AmigoBot and cloud host is introduced,then the basic conception and data transmission flow of TCP/IP are analyzed.The stability of network communication is tested as well.Finally,cloud robot system is established and a series of experiments are conducted.The simulation and experiment results indicate that the proposed method is efficient for transferring computing task.