Nearest Neighbor-based Rendezvous for Sparsely Connected Mobile Agents
This work addresses coordination challenges for sparsely connected mobile agents like UGVs and UAVs, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing rendezvous protocols with a focus on dynamic constraints.
The paper tackles the problem of achieving rendezvous for mobile agents with nontrivial dynamics using a nearest-neighbor communication protocol, and it guarantees convergence to a common point even when each agent communicates with only one neighbor outside a small priority zone.
In this paper a convergent, nearest-neighbor, control protocol is suggested for agents with nontrivial dynamics. The protocol guarantees convergence to a common point in space even if each agent is restricted to communicate with a single nearest neighbor. The neighbor, however, is required to lie outside an arbitrarily small priority zone surrounding the agent. The control protocol consists of two layers interconnected in a provably-correct manner. The first layer provides the guidance signal to a rendezvous point assuming that the agents have first order dynamics. The other layer converts in a decentralized manner the guidance signal to a control signal that suits realistic agents such as UGVs, UAVs and holonomic agents with second order dynamics.