Multi-Robot Data Gathering Under Buffer Constraints and Intermittent Communication

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed coordination approach for heterogeneous robots to gather data under buffer and intermittent communication constraints, ensuring task satisfaction without continuous connectivity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed motion and communication scheme that guarantees local task fulfillment while managing buffer limits and limited communication range.

Findings

The method effectively coordinates robots to prevent buffer overflow.

It outperforms existing approaches requiring constant network connectivity.

Numerical simulations and experiments validate the approach's effectiveness.

Abstract

We consider a team of heterogeneous robots which are deployed within a common workspace to gather different types of data. The robots have different roles due to different capabilities: some gather data from the workspace (source robots) and others receive data from source robots and upload them to a data center (relay robots). The data-gathering tasks are specified locally to each source robot as high-level Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas, that capture the different types of data that need to be gathered at different regions of interest. All robots have a limited buffer to store the data. Thus the data gathered by source robots should be transferred to relay robots before their buffers overflow, respecting at the same time limited communication range for all robots. The main contribution of this work is a distributed motion coordination and intermittent communication scheme that guarantees the satisfaction of all local tasks, while obeying the above constraints. The robot motion and inter-robot communication are closely coupled and coordinated during run time by scheduling intermittent meeting events to facilitate the local plan execution. We present both numerical simulations and experimental studies to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over existing approaches that predominantly require all-time network connectivity.