Communication-Aware Coordination of Multi-Robot Systems
- Date of defense: 06-June-2025
- Jury Members:
- Enrico Natalizio – LORIA, France Reviewer
- Sabine Hauert – University of Bristol, UK – Reviewer
- Nathalie Mitton – Inria Lille, France – Examiner
- Danny Hughes – KU Leuven, Belgium – Examiner
- Filip Maksimovic – Inria Paris, France – PhD Advisor
- Thomas Watteyne – Inria Paris, France – PhD Advisor
- Invited People:
- Marcus Eliasson – Bitcraze, Sweden – Industrial Guest
- Summary: This PhD thesis focuses on developing low-cost, high-accuracy localization and communication technologies for large-scale multi-robot systems, with a target use case of localizing 1,000 miniature mobile robots indoors for the Horizon Europe OpenSwarm project. The thesis introduces a novel localization pipeline based on the Valve Lighthouse v2 system, originally designed for VR. The proposed algorithms achieve up to 7.25 mm RMS accuracy in 2D and 11.2 mm in 3D, all using affordable off-the-shelf hardware.In addition, the thesis presents Metronome, a dynamic Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) network protocol capable of coordinating over 100 robots with low latency, and introduces an automatic calibration method based on circular motion that removes the need for manual setup. Together, these contributions provide a scalable and cost-effective foundation for large swarms of autonomous robots operating indoors.
