Analysis of the Effects of Failure and Noise in the Distributed Connectivity Maintenance of a Multi-robot System

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how failure and noise affect the connectivity maintenance in multi-robot systems, demonstrating the resilience of the strategy under realistic conditions with bandwidth limits, and suggesting potential for adaptive applications.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the impact of communication failures and noise on a connectivity maintenance control strategy in multi-robot systems, highlighting its robustness.

Findings

Connectivity strategy is resilient to disturbances under realistic bandwidth constraints.

The approach can be integrated into adaptive schemes for efficiency and energy management.

Results support applying the strategy in real-world, noisy multi-robot environments.

Abstract

To perform cooperative tasks in a decentralized manner, multi-robot systems are often required to communicate with each other. Therefore, maintaining the communication graph connectivity is a fundamental issue when roaming a territory with obstacles. However, when dealing with real-robot systems, several sources of data corruption can appear in the agent interaction. In this paper, the effects of failure and noise in the communication between agents are analyzed upon a connectivity maintenance control strategy. The results show that the connectivity strategy is resilient to the negative effects of such disturbances under realistic settings that consider a bandwidth limit for the control effort. This opens the perspective of applying the connectivity maintenance strategy in adaptive schemes that consider, for instance, autonomous adaptation to constraints other than connectivity itself, e.g. communication efficiency and energy harvesting.