Distributed Coordination

Cooperative mobile robots have recently been gaining importance within the field of robotics. It's been proven that collaborative robots can do tasks in a faster and more reliable manner than a single robot can. Additionally, recent advances in distributed coordination algorithms have dramatically improved the feasibility and suitability of cooperative approaches. This has lead researchers to develop Inter-robot communication frameworks. While several frameworks have been introduced, one of the most common is the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). However, the suitability of SOA for collaborative robotic communication has not been fully evaluated. In this paper we evaluate the SOA from an overhead perspective against non service-based architectures in a wireless environment. Our evaluation is based on performance suitability, which is determined by measuring throughput and delay for different numbers of mobile robots sharing real time data.

Research on  multi-agent systems has attracted much attention in
the past two decades, and numerous results have been obtained. Its
widespread applications include spacecraft, mobile robots, sensor
networks, etc.  Most previous research works on multi-agent
systems studied the first- and second-order dynamics. However, in
engineering, many systems are modeled by higher-order dynamics.
This paper reviews the major results and progress in distributed
high-order multi-agent coordination. After the review, a short
discussion section is included to summarize the existing research
and  propose several promising research directions along with some
open problems that are deemed important for further
investigations.

Citation: Jie Huang, Hao Fang, Lihua Dou, Jie Chen. An overview of  distributed high-order multi-agent coordination.  IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, 2014, 1(1): 1-9

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