Forming Connected Multi-Robot Teams Utilizing Aerial Robots

In this paper, we study the connected multi-robot team formation problem. We consider the settings where multiple aerial and ground robots with limited communication ranges are operating in an unbounded environment. The ground robots do not have a priori knowledge about the initial locations of each other and the aerial robots. Moreover, the aerial robots do not know the initial locations of the ground robots in advance. Our goal is to divide the robots into teams as quickly as possible by relocating them. Each team should be of same size and include one aerial robot assigned to it as its leader, and the final configurations of the robots in each team should form a fully connected network topology. To solve this problem, we present an algorithm that combines distributed coordination and online planning of the robots. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in simulations.