Decentralized Connectivity Control in Quadcopters: a Field Study of Communication Performance

TL;DR

This paper presents a full hardware and software implementation of a decentralized control law for maintaining connectivity in quadcopter teams, validated through real-world field tests assessing communication performance.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive field study of a decentralized connectivity control approach for quadcopters, bridging the gap between theory and practical deployment.

Findings

Successful real-world implementation of decentralized connectivity control

Effective communication exchange in quadcopter teams during field tests

Validation of theoretical approaches in practical scenarios

Abstract

Redundancy and parallelism make decentralized multi-robot systems appealing solutions for the exploration of extreme environments. However, effective cooperation often requires team-wide connectivity and a carefully designed communication strategy. Several recently proposed decentralized connectivity maintenance approaches exploit elegant algebraic results drawn from spectral graph theory. Yet, these proposals are rarely taken beyond simulations or laboratory implementations. In this work, we present two major contributions: (i) we describe the full-stack implementation---from hardware to software---of a decentralized control law for robust connectivity maintenance; and (ii) we assess, in the field, our setup's ability to correctly exchange all the necessary information required to maintain connectivity in a team of quadcopters.