Automatic Deployment and Formation Control of Decentralized Multi-Agent Networks

(c) 2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543198Novel tools are needed to deploy multi-agent networks in applications that require a high degree of accuracy in the achievement and maintenance of geometric formations. This is the case when deploying distributed sensing devices across large spatial domains. Through so-called Embedded Graph Grammars (EGGs), this paper develops a method for automatically generating control programs that ensure that a multi-robot network is deployed according to the desired configuration. This paper presents a communication protocol needed for implementing and executing the control programs in an accurate and deadlock-free manner