CoCo Games: Graphical Game-Theoretic Swarm Control for Communication-Aware Coverage
This addresses coverage control for robot swarms in communication-constrained environments, representing an incremental advance in swarm robotics.
The paper tackles real-time communication-aware coverage control for networked robot swarms by formulating it as a cooperative graphical game and using variational inference to reach Nash equilibria. The approach was experimentally validated with aerial vehicles and terrestrial user equipment, showing it can provide wireless coverage to stationary and mobile UEs under realistic network conditions.
We propose a novel framework for real-time communication-aware coverage control in networked robot swarms. Our framework unifies the robot dynamics with network-level message-routing to reach consensus on swarm formations in the presence of communication uncertainties by leveraging local information. Specifically, we formulate the communication-aware coverage as a cooperative graphical game, and use variational inference to reach mixed strategy Nash equilibria of the stage games. We experimentally validate the proposed approach in a mobile ad-hoc wireless network scenario using teams of aerial vehicles and terrestrial user equipment (UE) operating over a large geographic region of interest. We show that our approach can provide wireless coverage to stationary and mobile UEs under realistic network conditions.