Concurrent Transmission for Multi-Robot Coordination
This addresses communication bottlenecks for mobile multi-robot systems, enabling faster dissemination and aggregation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing concurrent transmission concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of inefficient communication in multi-robot systems by introducing a concurrent transmission strategy with a split architecture, achieving centimeter-level spatial and millisecond-level temporal accuracy with low radio duty-cycling in experiments.
An efficient communication mechanism forms the backbone for any multi-robot system to achieve fruitful collaboration and coordination. Limitation in the existing asynchronous transmission based strategies in fast dissemination and aggregation compels the designers to prune down such requirements as much as possible. This also restricts the possible application areas of mobile multi-robot systems. In this work, we introduce concurrent transmission based strategy as an alternative. Despite the commonly found difficulties in concurrent transmission such as microsecond level time synchronization, hardware heterogeneity, etc., we demonstrate how it can be exploited for multi-robot systems. We propose a split architecture where the two major activities - communication and computation are carried out independently and coordinate through periodic interactions. The proposed split architecture is applied on a custom build full networked control system consisting of five two-wheel differential drive mobile robots having heterogeneous architecture. We use the proposed design in a leader-follower setting for coordinated dynamic speed variation as well as the independent formation of various shapes. Experiments show a centimeter-level spatial and millisecond-level temporal accuracy while spending very low radio duty-cycling over multi-hop communication under a wide testing area.