Exploiting Task Regularities to Transform Between Reference Frames in Robot Teams

|We describe a team of robots that uses a trail of landmarks to navigate between places of interest. The landmarks are not physical; they are waypoint coordinates generated online by each robot and shared with team-mates over the network. Waypoints are speci ed with reference to features in the world that are relevant to the team's task and common to all robots. Using such task-level features as landmarks avoids the need to sense and name physical landmarks. Using these common landmarks, each robot can transform waypoint coordinates into its local reference frame, avoiding the cost of maintaining a xed global coordinate system. The algorithm is tested in an experiment in which a team of 4 autonomous mobile robots run in our oÆce building for more than 3 hours, travelling a total of 8.2km (5.1 miles). Despite signi cant divergence of their local coordinate systems, they are able to share waypoints, forming and following a common trail between two xed locations.