Spatio-Temporal Reconnection for Multi-Robot Networks using Adaptive Prescribed-Time CBFs
For multi-robot systems, this work relaxes the restrictive requirement of persistent connectivity, enabling more efficient task execution in large environments.
This paper proposes an adaptive prescribed-time control barrier function framework that allows multi-robot teams to temporarily disconnect and later reconnect within a prescribed time, improving task efficiency while ensuring timely information sharing.
In multi-robot systems, maintaining persistent communication graph connectivity is often overly restrictive, especially when robots have limited communication ranges but operate in large environments. Instead, allowing robots to temporarily disconnect and later reconnect is often more desirable for efficient task execution while still ensuring timely information sharing across the team. In this paper, we propose an adaptive prescribed-time control barrier function (adaptive PT-CBF) framework that enables robots to temporarily disconnect and re-enter the communication range within an adjustable and feasible prescribed time. Moreover, we introduce a reconnection triggering mechanism that jointly considers task execution and reconnection urgency, thereby providing a principled way to decide when reconnection should occur. Theoretical analysis justifies convergence to the satisfying reconnection within a prescribed finite time. Experimental results validate the performance of our proposed adaptive PT-CBF with improved task efficiency and satisfying reconnections.