Realm: Real-Time Line-of-Sight Maintenance in Multi-Robot Navigation with Unknown Obstacles

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bai, Ruofei, Yuan, Shenghai, Li, Kun, Guo, Hongliang, Yau, Wei-Yun, Xie, Lihua
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bai, Ruofei
Yuan, Shenghai
Li, Kun
Guo, Hongliang
Yau, Wei-Yun
Xie, Lihua
author_facet Bai, Ruofei
Yuan, Shenghai
Li, Kun
Guo, Hongliang
Yau, Wei-Yun
Xie, Lihua
contents Multi-robot navigation in complex environments relies on inter-robot communication and mutual observations for coordination and situational awareness. This paper studies the multi-robot navigation problem in unknown environments with line-of-sight (LoS) connectivity constraints. While previous works are limited to known environment models to derive the LoS constraints, this paper eliminates such requirements by directly formulating the LoS constraints between robots from their real-time point cloud measurements, leveraging point cloud visibility analysis techniques. We propose a novel LoS-distance metric to quantify both the urgency and sensitivity of losing LoS between robots considering potential robot movements. Moreover, to address the imbalanced urgency of losing LoS between two robots, we design a fusion function to capture the overall urgency while generating gradients that facilitate robots' collaborative movement to maintain LoS. The LoS constraints are encoded into a potential function that preserves the positivity of the Fiedler eigenvalue of the robots' network graph to ensure connectivity. Finally, we establish a LoS-constrained exploration framework that integrates the proposed connectivity controller. We showcase its applications in multi-robot exploration in complex unknown environments, where robots can always maintain the LoS connectivity through distributed sensing and communication, while collaboratively mapping the unknown environment. The implementations are open-sourced at https://github.com/bairuofei/LoS_constrained_navigation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_15162
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Realm: Real-Time Line-of-Sight Maintenance in Multi-Robot Navigation with Unknown Obstacles
Bai, Ruofei
Yuan, Shenghai
Li, Kun
Guo, Hongliang
Yau, Wei-Yun
Xie, Lihua
Robotics
Multi-robot navigation in complex environments relies on inter-robot communication and mutual observations for coordination and situational awareness. This paper studies the multi-robot navigation problem in unknown environments with line-of-sight (LoS) connectivity constraints. While previous works are limited to known environment models to derive the LoS constraints, this paper eliminates such requirements by directly formulating the LoS constraints between robots from their real-time point cloud measurements, leveraging point cloud visibility analysis techniques. We propose a novel LoS-distance metric to quantify both the urgency and sensitivity of losing LoS between robots considering potential robot movements. Moreover, to address the imbalanced urgency of losing LoS between two robots, we design a fusion function to capture the overall urgency while generating gradients that facilitate robots' collaborative movement to maintain LoS. The LoS constraints are encoded into a potential function that preserves the positivity of the Fiedler eigenvalue of the robots' network graph to ensure connectivity. Finally, we establish a LoS-constrained exploration framework that integrates the proposed connectivity controller. We showcase its applications in multi-robot exploration in complex unknown environments, where robots can always maintain the LoS connectivity through distributed sensing and communication, while collaboratively mapping the unknown environment. The implementations are open-sourced at https://github.com/bairuofei/LoS_constrained_navigation.
title Realm: Real-Time Line-of-Sight Maintenance in Multi-Robot Navigation with Unknown Obstacles
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15162