Consensus Control of Distributed Robots Using Direction of Arrival of Wireless Signals

In multi-robot applications, consensus control and coordination are vital and potentially repetitive tasks. To circumvent practical limitations such as a global localization system, researchers have focused on bearing-based consensus controllers, but most assumed that measurements from sensors (e.g., vision) are noise-free. In this paper, we propose to use wireless signal measurements to estimate the direction of arrival (relative bearings) of neighboring robots and introduce a weighted bearing consensus controller to achieve coordinate-free distributed multi-robot rendezvous. We prove that the proposed controller guarantees connectivity maintenance and convergence even in the presence of measurement noise. We conduct extensive numerical simulation experiments using the Robotarium multi-robot platform to verify and demonstrate the properties of the proposed controller and to compare the performance of the rendezvous task against several state-of-the-art rendezvous controllers.