Closed loop motion planning of cooperating mobile robots using graph connectivity

In this paper we address the problem of planning the motion of a team of cooperating mobile robots subject to constraints on relative configuration imposed by the nature of the task they are executing. We model constraints between robots using a graph where each edge is associated with the interaction between two robots and describes a constraint on relative configurations. We develop a decentralized motion control system that leads each robot to their individual goals while maintaining the constraints specified on the graph. We present experimental results with groups of holonomic and non-holonomic mobile robots.