This paper addresses the coordinated navigation of multiple independently actuated disk-shaped robots-all placed within the same disk-shaped workspace. Assuming perfect sensing, shared-centralized communications and computation, as well as perfect actuation, we encode complete information about the goal, obstacles, and workspace boundary using an artificial potential function over the configuration space of the robots' simultaneous nonoverlapping positions. The closed-loop dynamics governing the motion of each (velocity-controlled) robot take the form of the appropriate projection of the gradient of this function. We impose (conservative) restrictions on the allowable goal positions that yield sufficient conditions for convergence: We prove that this construction is an essential navigation function that guarantees collision-free motion of each robot to its destination from almost all initial free placements. The results of an extensive simulation study investigate practical issues such as average resulting trajectory length and robustness against simulated sensor noise.

A collection of unactuated disk-shaped "parts" must be brought by an actuated manipulator robot into a specified configuration from arbitrary initial conditions. The task is cast as a noncooperative game played among the parts-which in turn yields a feedback-based event-driven approach to plan generation and execution. The correctness of this approach, an open question, has been demonstrated in simpler settings and is further suggested by the extensive experiments reported here using an actual working implementation with EDAR-a mobile robot operating in a purely feedback-based event-driven manner. These results verify the reliability of this approach against uncertainties in sensory information and unanticipated changes in workspace configuration.

This paper deals with the parts moving problem based on an event-driven planning and control. We are interested in developing feedback based approaches to the automatic generation of actuator commands that cause the robot to move a set of parts from an arbitrary initial disassembled configuration to a specified final configuration. In the Phase 1 of this project, a composite algorithm that reactively switches between different feedback controllers is shown to induce a noncooperative game being played among the parts being manipulated. This paper describes experimental results with EDAR (event-driven assembler robot) developed for moving parts based on feedback techniques.