Fast Biconnectivity Restoration in Multi-Robot Systems for Robust Communication Maintenance

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of quickly restoring biconnectivity in multi-robot communication networks after failures, proposing an optimal formulation and an efficient approximation algorithm with strong empirical performance.

Contribution

It introduces a quadratic programming formulation for the FBR problem and an approximation algorithm that outperforms existing solutions in speed and near-optimality.

Findings

The approximation algorithm performs close to the optimal solution.

The proposed method significantly outperforms existing solutions in empirical tests.

The quadratic programming formulation provides a basis for optimal repair strategies.

Abstract

Maintaining a robust communication network plays an important role in the success of a multi-robot team jointly performing an optimization task. A key characteristic of a robust multi-robot system is the ability to repair the communication topology itself in the case of robot failure. In this paper, we focus on the Fast Biconnectivity Restoration (FBR) problem, which aims to repair a connected network to make it biconnected as fast as possible, where a biconnected network is a communication topology that cannot be disconnected by removing one node. We develop a Quadratically Constrained Program (QCP) formulation of the FBR problem, which provides a way to optimally solve the problem. We also propose an approximation algorithm for the FBR problem based on graph theory. By conducting empirical studies, we demonstrate that our proposed approximation algorithm performs close to the optimal while significantly outperforming the existing solutions.