Analysis of implementation issues of consensus algorithms with mobile robots

This thesis presents analysis of various implementation issues associated with cooperative control of mobile robot groups and seeks to extend the current research to new areas of application. Cooperative control of mobile robots requires inter-robot communication, stable multi-agent control algorithms, and efficient information sharing techniques. Addressing some of these issues comes at the implementation level. Motivated by current research, a comparison between information relay and local information exchange strategies to achieve robot group rendezvous utilizing a consensus based algorithm is conducted. Then a strategy to achieve multi-robot rendezvous is experimentally studied on MASnet under limited and switching topologies to determine their effect on formation motion. A new cooperative control platform called LUNAR is developed and its capabilities are described. Current consensus-based formation control research is then extended to develop a novel unified approach to formation control with a single or multiple leaders. This approach is experimentally explored, the capabilities are identified, and the stability in the event of severe communication limitation and dynamic robot elimination and addition within the formation is experimentally verified.