Integrated heterogeneous multi-robot system for collaborative navigation

In this paper, we present an integrated heterogeneous multi-robot system that considers the problem of how heterogeneous autonomous robots, including wheeled robots and four-legged robots, which are different both in hardware and software, can collaborate to navigate in an unknown corridor environment. The navigation tasks involve detecting environment features, self-localizing, performing the planned navigation actions. On the one hand, a time-variable limit cycle based method is created to perform real-time obstacle avoidance. On the other hand, we propose a dynamic reference object based collaborative approach for self localization. Satisfactory experimental results are obtained in real robot experiments.