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Robust connectivity maintenance for fallible robots

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Abstract

Multi-robot systems are promising tools for many hazardous real-world problems. In particular, the practical application of swarm robotics was identified as one of the grand challenges of the next decade. As swarms enter the real world, they have to deal with the inevitable problems of hardware, software, and communication failure, especially for long-term deployments. Communication is a key element for effective collaboration, and the ability of robots to communicate is expressed by the swarm’s connectivity. In this paper, we analyze a set of techniques to assess, control, and enforce connectivity in the context of fallible robots. Past research has addressed the issue of connectivity but, for the most part, without making system reliability a constitutional part of the model. We introduce a controller for connectivity maintenance in the presence of faults and discuss the optimization of its parameters and performance. We validate our approach in simulation and via physical robot experiments.

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Notes

  1. This definition of the edge-weights introduces a discontinuity in the control action that can be avoided introducing a smooth bump function (Do 2008). However, from an implementation viewpoint, the effect of the discontinuity can be made negligible by choosing a sufficiently small threshold \(\varDelta \).

  2. https://www.k-team.com/mobile-robotics-products/khepera-iv.

  3. https://github.com/MISTLab/Buzz.

  4. https://github.com/MISTLab/BuzzKH4.

  5. http://optitrack.com/products/prime-13/specs.html.

  6. https://github.com/MISTLab/blabbermouth.

  7. To do so, we evaluated all the combinations of gains using the following values: [0.01, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1., 1.5, 2.0].

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Québec’s Ministère des Relations Internationales et de la Francophonie (MRIF) and Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) for supporting SCMQI’s project QU17MO04 “Maintenance and Control of Distributed Robot and Sensor Network”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Software Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal, Montreal, Canada

    Jacopo Panerati, Lucas Meyer, Marcel Kaufmann & Giovanni Beltrame

  2. Department of Science and Methods of Engineering, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy

    Marco Minelli & Lorenzo Sabattini

  3. Departamento de Computação Científica, Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica, São José dos Campos, Brazil

    Cinara Ghedini

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  1. Jacopo Panerati
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  2. Marco Minelli
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Correspondence to Jacopo Panerati.

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This is one of the several papers published in Autonomous Robots comprising the Special Issue on Foundations of Resilience for Networked Robotic Systems.

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Panerati, J., Minelli, M., Ghedini, C. et al. Robust connectivity maintenance for fallible robots. Auton Robot 43, 769–787 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-018-9812-8

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