CoCo Games: Graphical Game-Theoretic Swarm Control for Communication-Aware Coverage

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time, communication-aware coverage control framework for robot swarms that unifies dynamics and network routing using graphical games and variational inference, validated with aerial and terrestrial experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel game-theoretic approach combining robot control and communication routing for coverage in uncertain network conditions.

Findings

Effective coverage of stationary and mobile UEs demonstrated

Unification of robot dynamics with network routing in a game-theoretic framework

Experimental validation in large geographic regions

Abstract

We propose a novel framework for real-time communication-aware coverage control in networked robot swarms. Our framework unifies the robot dynamics with network-level message-routing to reach consensus on swarm formations in the presence of communication uncertainties by leveraging local information. Specifically, we formulate the communication-aware coverage as a cooperative graphical game, and use variational inference to reach mixed strategy Nash equilibria of the stage games. We experimentally validate the proposed approach in a mobile ad-hoc wireless network scenario using teams of aerial vehicles and terrestrial user equipment (UE) operating over a large geographic region of interest. We show that our approach can provide wireless coverage to stationary and mobile UEs under realistic network conditions.