Development and deployment of a line of sight virtual sensor for heterogeneous teams

For a team of cooperating robots, geometry plays a vital role in operation. Knowledge of line of sight to local obstacles and adjacent teammates is critical in both the movement and planning stages to avoid collisions, maintain formation and localize the team. However, determining if other robots are within the line of sight of one another is difficult with existing sensor platforms - especially as the scale of the robot is reduced. We describe a method of exploiting collective team information to generate a virtual sensor that provides line of sight determination, greater range and resolution and the ability to generalize local sensing. We develop this sensor and apply it to the control of a tightly coupled, resource-limited robot team called Millibots.