A Human-friendly Verbal Communication Platform for Multi-Robot Systems: Design and Principles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a network-independent, human-friendly verbal communication platform for multi-robot systems, enabling adaptable, transparent, and secure communication in environments lacking traditional network infrastructure.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel verbal communication platform for multi-robot systems that operates independently of network infrastructure, suitable for diverse environments like underwater and space.

Findings

Demonstrated effective multi-robot communication and coordination without network reliance.

Validated platform's adaptability across various challenging environments.

Open-sourced the implementation for community use.

Abstract

While multi-robot systems have been broadly researched and deployed, their success is built chiefly upon the dependency on network infrastructures, whether wired or wireless. Aiming at the first steps toward de-coupling the application of multi-robot systems from the reliance on network infrastructures, this paper proposes a human-friendly verbal communication platform for multi-robot systems, following the deliberately designed principles of being adaptable, transparent, and secure. The platform is network independent and is subsequently capable of functioning in network infrastructure lacking environments from underwater to planet explorations. A series of experiments were conducted to demonstrate the platform's capability in multi-robot systems communication and task coordination, showing its potential in infrastructure-free applications. To benefit the community, we have made the codes open source at https://github.com/jynxmagic/MSc_AI_project