Concurrent Transmission for Multi-Robot Coordination

TL;DR

This paper introduces a concurrent transmission communication strategy for multi-robot systems, enabling faster, more reliable coordination with high spatial and temporal accuracy, overcoming limitations of traditional asynchronous methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel split architecture leveraging concurrent transmission for multi-robot communication, demonstrating improved coordination in heterogeneous robot networks.

Findings

Achieved centimeter-level spatial accuracy

Attained millisecond-level temporal accuracy

Reduced radio duty-cycling in multi-hop communication

Abstract

An efficient communication mechanism forms the backbone for any multi-robot system to achieve fruitful collaboration and coordination. Limitation in the existing asynchronous transmission based strategies in fast dissemination and aggregation compels the designers to prune down such requirements as much as possible. This also restricts the possible application areas of mobile multi-robot systems. In this work, we introduce concurrent transmission based strategy as an alternative. Despite the commonly found difficulties in concurrent transmission such as microsecond level time synchronization, hardware heterogeneity, etc., we demonstrate how it can be exploited for multi-robot systems. We propose a split architecture where the two major activities - communication and computation are carried out independently and coordinate through periodic interactions. The proposed split architecture is applied on a custom build full networked control system consisting of five two-wheel differential drive mobile robots having heterogeneous architecture. We use the proposed design in a leader-follower setting for coordinated dynamic speed variation as well as the independent formation of various shapes. Experiments show a centimeter-level spatial and millisecond-level temporal accuracy while spending very low radio duty-cycling over multi-hop communication under a wide testing area.