Multi-robot Systems Using Broadcast Control Framework with Visual-Based Tracking

The multi-robot application is becoming more critical in achieving complex collaborative tasks. This requires an efficient multi-agent robot system that supports distributed tasks, time and energy consumption. One of the developing control methods is the broadcast control framework. We found that variants of broadcast control techniques were validated on simulation only and lacked experimental work. Therefore, this paper focus on the experimental investigation of a variant of the broadcast control framework. To create a similar environment to the application, we developed the system using Raspberry Pi, AlphaBots, a webcam, and Bluetooth as the central controller, robots, visual tracking, and wireless communication. We successfully validated the system in an indoor environment. The experimental finding shows the travelling trajectory of the robots differs from the MATLAB simulation results. Nonetheless, the broadcast control framework system was able to achieve the final target accurately. This paper provides implementation details and challenges for future research and development of a broadcast control framework. We propose to include obstacle avoidance in robots as a new study direction.