Scalable Control of Distributed Robotic Macrosensors

This paper describes a control mechanism by which large numbers of inexpensive robots can be deployed as a distributed remote sensing instrument, and in which the desired large-scale properties of the sensing instrument emerge from the simple pair-wise interactions of its component robots. Such sensing instruments are called distributed robotic macrosensors. Robots in the macrosensor interact with their immediate neighbors using a virtual spring mesh abstraction, which is governed by a simple physics model. By carefully defining the nature of the spring mesh and the associated physics model, it is possible to create a number of desirable global behaviors without any global control or configuration. Properties of the resulting macrosensor include arbitrary scalability, the ability to function in complex environments, sophisticated target tracking ability, and natural fault tolerance. We describe the control mechanisms that yield these results, and the simulation results that demonstrate their efficacy.