Efficient Communication in Large Multi-robot Networks
Ayan Dutta, Anirban Ghosh, Stephen Sisley, O. Patrick Kreidl
Abstract
To achieve coordination in a multi-robot system, the robots typically resort to some form of communication among each other. In most of the multi-robot coordination frameworks, high-level coordination strategies are studied but `how' the ground-level communication takes place, is assumed to be taken care of by another program. In this paper, we study the communication routing problem for large multi-robot systems where the robots have limited communication ranges. The objective is to send a message from a robot to another in the network, routed through a low number of other robots. To this end, we propose a communication model between any pair of robots using peer-to-peer radio communication. Our proposed model is generic to any type of message and guarantees a low hop routing between any pair of robots in this network. These help the robots to exchange large messages (e.g., multi-spectral images) in a short amount of time. Results show that our proposed approach easily scales up to 1000 robots while drastically reducing the space complexity for maintaining the network information.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2020_efficientcommuni,
title = {Efficient Communication in Large Multi-robot Networks},
author = {Ayan Dutta and Anirban Ghosh and Stephen Sisley and O. Patrick Kreidl},
booktitle = {ICRA 2020},
year = {2020}
}