Minimally Constraining Line-of-Sight Connectivity Maintenance for Collision-free Multi-Robot Networks under Uncertainty

Yupeng Yang, Yiwei Lyu, Wenhao Luo

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the Line-of-Sight (LOS) connectivity maintenance under positional uncertainty for a team of robots consisting of multiple subgroups with given parallel tasks. The LOS connectivity between pairwise robots is preserved when the two robots are within the limited communication range and their LOS is occlusion-free from static obstacles over time. By unifying a control theoretic approach and a graph theoretic approach, we develop an Uncertainty Aware Line-of-Sight Minimum Spanning Tree (LOS-MST) framework to compute robots' motion that maintains only a minimally constraining set of LOS edges among robots for global and subgroup LOS connectivity, while minimizing the motion disruption to their original multi-robot behaviors. Simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.