Self-healing for mobile robot networks with motion synchronization

The objective of self-healing in mobile robot networks is to maintain not only logical topology but also physical one of a network when robots fail. An interaction dynamics model is first established to describe both logical and physical topologies of the network. Considering the mobility of mobile robot networks, we propose a recursive, distributed topology control for self-healing when mobile robots fail, and give a metric of the topology structure for evaluating the performance of recovered network topologies. Then, we prove the stability of motion synchronization with the topology control based on Lyapunov exponent. Finally, the results of simulations have demonstrated the validity of the proposed modeling and control methods.