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Multi-robot deployment and coordination with embedded graph grammars
Smith B., Howard A., McNew J., Wang J., Egerstedt M. Autonomous Robots26 (1):79-98,2009.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Jul 16 2009

Multiagent robotic networks constitute a way to sense an environment and report data from it using robotic technology; that is, we can use a team of robots covering a location, in order to analyze and obtain data from this environment.

This paper presents an interesting point of view about multi-robot systems. It uses the embedded graph grammars (EGG) formalism to characterize the coordination, interaction, and control of a multi-robot system.

However, there are a few points that should be considered for a future paper. I felt that Smith et al. could have explained more clearly the purpose or real application of the work presented here. They should have justified the motivation for using a multiagent robotic network in their case. With respect to the mobile platform SpiderMode, I felt that the easy perception/sensing procedure based on image data could be inappropriate for real tasks. Perhaps, in the future, they could consider more robust and advanced methods.

In Section 5, the authors present a kinematic model to analyze the motion of the vehicles. The title of this section could be misleading because they use the word “dynamics,” which involves forces and moments in vehicle motion, and this is really different from kinematic analysis. Furthermore, in the kinematic model presented in this section, the authors do not take into account the slip phenomenon. Slip has been demonstrated to be a key issue for mobile robots operating in outdoor applications (as presented here).

The authors do not describe in the paper how a mobile robot controls its own trajectory; they describe control laws for assuring the network topology, but say nothing about local control of each robot. Also, I think that more than three robots should be used in real tests.

Finally, the robots they use in Section 6 are different from the ones detailed in Section 2.1; they should describe these platforms before addressing the experiments. In Section 6.1, the authors state that the robots can estimate the relative position between them by using a global positioning system (GPS). They should have explained this process in more detail, because the precision error of a standalone GPS is about ten meters, while that of a differential GPS is about one meter. How can they use this information to deploy the formation? This point should have been clarified.

Despite these criticisms, I conclude that this paper is a good contribution to the area of coordination and control of multi-robot systems. Experiments like these help us to better understand the EGG formalism.

Reviewer:  Ramon Gonzalez Sanchez Review #: CR137108 (1003-0298)
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Robotics (I.2.9 )
 
 
Coherence And Coordination (I.2.11 ... )
 
 
Control Theory (I.2.8 ... )
 
 
Multiagent Systems (I.2.11 ... )
 
 
Distributed Artificial Intelligence (I.2.11 )
 
 
Problem Solving, Control Methods, And Search (I.2.8 )
 
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