Autonomous Navigation for Multiple Mobile Robots under Time Delay in Communication

This paper addresses the navigation problem for mobile robots under uncertain working conditions. It is assumed that the environment is unknown at the beginning of any experiment and that a visual feedback module supports the navigation strategy to make a set of robots achieve a goal in an environment with obstacles. The proposed navigation algorithm depends on the obstacle localization, and it is based on visibility conditions of the goal and control points that are defined from the geometric distribution of the environment. The problem has been widely addressed in the literature; however, in this work it is solved by means of a low cost vision system which incorporates a natural restriction in the rate of capture. This fact limits the maximal velocity of each robot, therefore high accelerations imply that the robot could not be detected in time, affecting the control system stability. This high acceleration problem is addressed by means of delay compensation on the communication channel with a scattering transformation strategy that guarantees to reach the goal position, allowing the robot to perform high velocities if needed. Real time experiments are developed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.