Distributed safe deployment of networked robots

Abstract

In real applications, it is always important to consider the generation of safe paths for robots during deployment or in future excursions through the environment. In order to include safety in the problem of deploying mobile robotic networks, we propose a new strategy based on the locational optimization framework. Our approach models the optimal deployment problem as a constrained optimization problem with inequality and equality constraints. This optimizationmodel is built by incorporating into the locational optimization framework new features such as the classical Generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD) commonly used as a safe roadmap in the context of path planning and a new metric to compute distance between robots and points in the environment. This new metric induces a new Voronoi partition of the environment. Furthermore, inspired by the classical Dijkstra algorithm, we present a novel efficient distributed algorithm to compute solutions in complicated environments.