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Probabilistic network formation through coverage and freeze-tag

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Abstract

We address the problem of propagating a piece of information among robots scattered in an environment. Initially, a single robot has the information. This robot searches for other robots to pass it along. When a robot is discovered, it can participate in the process by searching for other robots. Since our motivation for studying this problem is to form an ad hoc network, we call it the Network Formation Problem. In this paper, we study the case where the environment is a rectangle and the robots’ locations are unknown but chosen uniformly at random. We present an efficient network formation algorithm, Stripes, and show that its expected performance is within a logarithmic factor of the optimal performance. We also compare Stripes with an intuitive network formation algorithm in simulations. The feasibility of Stripes is demonstrated with a proof-of-concept implementation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 110 8th Street, Troy, NY, 12180, USA

    Eric Meisner & Wei Yang

  2. University of Minnesota, 4-192 EE/CS Building, 200 Union Street SE, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Volkan Isler

Authors
  1. Eric Meisner
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  2. Wei Yang
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  3. Volkan Isler
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Correspondence to Volkan Isler.

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Meisner, E., Yang, W. & Isler, V. Probabilistic network formation through coverage and freeze-tag. Intel Serv Robotics 2, 265–273 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-009-0051-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-009-0051-x

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