RASS: Risk-Aware Swarm Storage

TL;DR

RASS is a decentralized, risk-aware storage and routing system for robot swarms that uses local information sharing to enhance data safety and accessibility in unknown environments, validated through simulation and real-world tests.

Contribution

This paper introduces RASS, a novel decentralized swarm storage and routing mechanism that leverages local information sharing to improve data safety and efficiency.

Findings

High reliability in data storage and routing speeds.

Effective in unknown environments through local information sharing.

Validated with both simulation and physical experiments.

Abstract

In robotics, data acquisition often plays a key part in unknown environment exploration. For example, storing information about the topography of the explored terrain or the natural dangers in the environment can inform the decision-making process of the robots. Therefore, it is crucial to store these data safely and to make it available quickly to the operators of the robotic system. In a decentralized system like a swarm of robots, this entails several challenges. To address them, we propose RASS, a decentralized risk-aware swarm storage and routing mechanism, which relies exclusively on local information sharing between neighbours to establish storage and routing fitness. We test our system through thorough experiments in a physics-based simulator and test its real-world applicability with physical experiments. We obtain convincing reliability, routing speeds, and swarm storage capacity results.