Fail-safe Mobility Management and Collision Prevention Platform for Cooperative Mobile Robots with Asynchronous Communications

Distributed computing extends its scope to address problems relevant to mobile computing where hosts are physically mobile. Since a robot can be seen as a mobile computer, it is natural to consider a group of autonomous mobile robots as a kind of mobile distributed system. How-ever, there are two fundamental differences with conventional distributed systems. The first is that robots usually require knowledge about their physical positions, and the second is that robots must control their own motion. Many interesting applications of mobile robotics envision groups or swarms of robots co-operating toward a common goal. Consider a distributed system composed of cooperative au-tonomous mobile robots cultivating a garden. This application requires that robots move in all directions sharing the same geographical space. We consider a category of robotic applications where mobile robots have limited energy resources and wide geographical distribution. There is no centralized control nor global synchronization. It is very important to focus on the problem of preventing collisions between mobile robots. Collision prevention leads to a dependable system and prevents the occurrence of serious dam