Abstract
Previously, the authors have proposed a scheme for collective control of a swarm of autonomous mobile robots. It enables a human operator to effectively control the geometrical center of the swarm only via bird-view observation and a broadcast command. However, for such control, it seems necessary that the operator and the every agent of the swarm refers to the same coordinate system. In this paper, first, the influences of deviations of coordinates among the operator and the agents due to dead-reckoning are examined theoretically. The result shows that, though the deviation between the operator and the average of the agents can easily be compensated by the operator, those among the agents lead to poor maneuverability and performance of the collective manual control. Thus, a method called COMPASS-CC is introduced which can merge the coordinate systems close enough among all the agents in a fully distributed way and without any global localization scheme, by extending the previously proposed method COMPASS. Besides, its effectiveness is analyzed both theoretically and by simulation. The equation for the practical estimation of the steady-state performance is derived and verified. Finally, the validity of the method is confirmed through manual control experiments using a swarm control simulator.
