A RSSI-based technique for inter-distance computation in Multi-Robot Systems

Multi-Robot Systems, i.e., collections of robots which cooperate to achieve a common goal, have become more and more appealing over the years to the robotics community. Research interests come from the several advantages that a multi-robot approach offers over traditional single complex robotic system approaches, such as a larger range of task domains or a higher robustness and flexibility. A primary concern is how to effectively achieve a cooperative behavior in multi-robot systems. Indeed, formation control turned out to be an important technique to achieve this goal. However, the majority of the approaches available in the literature assumes robots to be able to measure inter-distances among them. For this reason, in this paper we focus our attention on providing a reliable technique to compute inter-distances among robots. Experimental results, carried out by exploiting Xbee-Pro radio transceiver, are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.