GUARDIANS multi-robot team as a self-organising system

The GUARDIANS robot swarm is selforganising and can be seen as a hybrid of a (heterogeneous) swarm, a mobile ad-hoc network and an (evolving) topological map of the environment. We assume that robots cooperate in order to deploy themselves, search the area and construct a (online) map of the environment. We present a novel approach of distributing robots on site that takes advantage of a cooperating robot team (with respect to a single robot) allowing us to accurately determine robot positioning and guide deployment in a pre-determined manner. This in turn leads to a topological representation of the environment that can be further developed to a metric map and used as the basis of building ad-hoc mobile wireless communication and sensor networks. The presented algorithms take into consideration also sensor limitation. The algorithms are to be applied on a group of Khepera III robots, specially upgraded to fulfill the needs of our approach. Multi-robot team : Self-organising system, topological representation, relative positioning, cooperative map building, ad-hoc communication network