D. V. Karthikeya Viswanath K. Madhava Krishna
This paper presents a methodology for coordination of multiple robotic agents moving from one location to another in an environment embedded with sensor motes. Sensor motes placed at strategic locations such as intersections coordinate robots in a way as to minimize the congestion, thus ensuring the continuous flow of robot traffic. A robot’s path to its destination is computed by the network in terms of the next waypoints to reach and local navigation to the next waypoint is achieved through a reactive navigation system. The motes are capable of identifying robots in their proximity based on signal strength. A mote controls the flow of agent traffic around it with the help of the data it collects from the messages received from the robots and other surrounding motes in the network. The coordination of traffic is achieved through two methods, one that assigns priorities to pathways leading to the intersection based on the traffic density and the other based on the popular method of reservation. Extensive comparisons show the performance gain of the current method over existing ones. Transferring the burden of coordination to the network releases more computational power for the robots to engage in critical assistive activities