Experiments in multirobot coordination

Consequent to previously published theoretical work by Marshall, Broucke, and Francis, this paper summarizes the apparatus and results of multirobot coordination experiments conducted at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. These experiments successfully demonstrated the practicality of cyclic pursuit as a distributed control strategy for multiple wheeled-robot systems. Moreover, the pursuit-based coordination algorithm was found to be surprisingly robust in the presence of unmodelled dynamics and delays due to sensing and information processing. The findings of this research not only bode well for continuing research on pursuit-based coordination strategies, but also for other cooperative multirobot control techniques employing similar local interactions.