RoboCast: Asynchronous Communication in Robot Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents RoboCast, a novel asynchronous communication framework for robot networks enabling information exchange among anonymous, sensor-limited robots without shared coordinates, supporting fundamental tasks like gathering.

Contribution

The paper introduces RoboCast, a flexible framework for asynchronous communication in robot swarms, including algorithms for broadcasting coordinate systems and performing gathering.

Findings

Successfully implemented asynchronous broadcasting of coordinate systems.

Demonstrated algorithms for deterministic gathering and binary information exchange.

Enhanced robot coordination with collision avoidance schemes.

Abstract

This paper introduces the \emph{RoboCast} communication abstraction. The RoboCast allows a swarm of non oblivious, anonymous robots that are only endowed with visibility sensors and do not share a common coordinate system, to asynchronously exchange information. We propose a generic framework that covers a large class of asynchronous communication algorithms and show how our framework can be used to implement fundamental building blocks in robot networks such as gathering or stigmergy. In more details, we propose a RoboCast algorithm that allows robots to broadcast their local coordinate systems to each others. Our algorithm is further refined with a local collision avoidance scheme. Then, using the RoboCast primitive, we propose algorithms for deterministic asynchronous gathering and binary information exchange.