A mobile robot network is said to be easily scalable to any number of robots if its performance is kept almost fixed after these robots are added or some fail in the network. An interaction dynamics model based on motion synchronization is first established. Considering the mobility of mobile robot networks, we propose a relay switched, distributed topology control for the scalable network to drive neMy added robots to the most suitable positions with more neighbors as well as self-heal the blank positions of failed robots, and give a metric of the topology structure for evaluating the performance of network topologies. Then, we prove the stability of motion synchronization with the individual control based on Lyapunov exponent. Finally, the results of simulations have demonstrated the validity of the proposed modeling and control methods.
A new scan matching method for mobile robot localization is presented, which takes line segment as the feature and matches the real scans in the given reference map by relationships of the directional-defined line segments. The alignment was done by hierarchically identifying the multiple relationships and the result was recorded in a correspondence matrix, where the best match is defined and selected for localization. It is indicated that the searching algorithm of the best match can find the ambiguities and get rid of them. This method with less computational cost works well in occluded environment, and can correct the error in pose estimation without the need for the estimation itself. The efficiency, accuracy and robustness of this method were verified by experiments of localization in an occluded environment and a long-distance indoor navigation.
