COMPASS: Self-organization of a common coordinate system in a herd of autonomous mobile robots using 1 to 1 bilateral proximity communications

Abstract

This paper deals with a method for a herd of mobile robots to self-organize information of a common coordinate system. In this method, it is assumed that each robot moves around autonomously having its own coordinate system and updating it using dead reckoninig. Encountering each other, two robots perform 1 to 1 bilateral proximity communication (called “conversation”) to exchange and modify their coordinate systems to be identical. After enough times of conversations, a common coordinate system is organized to be shared among all the robots. In this paper, we describe the scheme precisely and confirm its validity by theoretical analysis, computer simulations and experiments employing real mobile minirobots.