Swarm Relays: Distributed Self-Healing Ground-and-Air Connectivity Chains

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, robust algorithm for robot swarms to maintain connectivity in complex 3D environments, enabling self-healing chains with ground and aerial robots in both simulation and real-world tests.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel self-healing, multi-robot chain-building algorithm that maintains connectivity in complex environments, including 3D spaces with flying robots, and demonstrates its effectiveness through extensive simulations and physical experiments.

Findings

Algorithm successfully maintains connectivity in complex environments.

Robust to single robot failures and can heal broken links.

Effective in both simulation and real-world heterogeneous robot scenarios.

Abstract

The coordination of robot swarms - large decentralized teams of robots - generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments. Unstructured environments, limited computational resources, low bandwidth, and robot failures all contribute to the complexity of connectivity maintenance. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight algorithm to navigate a group of robots in complex environments while maintaining connectivity by building a chain of robots. The algorithm is robust to single robot failures and can heal broken communication links. The algorithm works in 3D environments: when a region is unreachable by wheeled robots, the chain is extended with flying robots. We test the performance of the algorithm using up to 100 robots in a physics-based simulator with three mazes and different robot failure scenarios. We then validate the algorithm with physical platforms: 7 wheeled robots and 6 flying ones, in homogeneous and heterogeneous scenarios.