Dynamic Mission Control for Decentralized Mobile Robot Swarms

Planning missions by truly autonomous robots is a challenge. This paper presents a novel approach to design mission functions for optimization-based controllers that generate trajectories without explicit goal specifications for each robot. Potential fields are used to implicitly describe the goal of a mission. This allows one to model a great variety of missions including nonlinearities, discontinuities, and discrete parts. The proposed control algorithm is designed for swarms in which the communication is based on unreliable mesh networks requiring a completely decentralized control. The selection of the missions presented in this paper is mostly requested for disaster areas, defense and security operations, and logistics. Furthermore, experiments express the functionality of the chosen mission functions and the performance of the entire approach.