Real-world Evaluation of a Novel Potential Field Sharing Method

Previously our novel Shared Potential Field (SPF) method has been introduced and compared against a non-sharing control in both simulation and laboratory settings. In this paper, we compare the SPF against an existing type of robot architecture, a hybrid robotic system. The task given to the multi-robot systems is to traverse an unknown environment, in search of a single target. The metric of performance was the time taken to find the target. Experiments show that the hybrid system showed similar performance to the nonsharing control. In contrast, our Pessimistic variant of the SPF outperformed the hybrid system in the cluttered environment, and the Optimistic SPF variant outperformed the hybrid system in the sparse environment. We conclude that the SPF method reacts more robustly to the dynamic nature of the real-world, and so performed significantly better throughout the experimentation.