Hybrid topology control: a dynamic leader-based distributed edge-addition and deletion mechanism

TL;DR

This paper introduces a leader-based distributed edge reconfiguration method for multi-robot systems that maintains network connectivity efficiently despite disturbances and delays, improving real-time decision-making.

Contribution

It presents a novel leader-based algorithm for dynamic topology control that reduces decision time and accounts for disturbances and delays in multi-robot systems.

Findings

Reduces reconfiguration decision time to graph diameter scale.

Effectively maintains connectivity under disturbances and delays.

Simulation results demonstrate improved performance and robustness.

Abstract

Coordinated operations of multi-robot systems (MRS) require agents to maintain communication connections to accomplish team objectives. However, maintaining the connections imposes costs in terms of restricted robot mobility, resulting in suboptimal team performance. In this work, we consider a realistic MRS framework in which agents are subject to unknown dynamical disturbances and experience communication delays. Most existing works on connectivity maintenance use consensus-based frameworks for graph reconfiguration, where decision-making time scales with the number of nodes and requires multiple rounds of communication, making them ineffective under communication delays. To address this, we propose a novel leader-based decision-making algorithm that uses a central node for efficient real-time reconfiguration, reducing decision-making time to depend on the graph diameter rather than the number of nodes and requiring only one round of information transfer through the network. We propose a novel method for estimating robot locations within the MRS that actively accounts for unknown disturbances and the communication delays. Using these position estimates, the central node selects a set of edges to delete while allowing the formation of new edges, aiming to keep the diameter of the new graph within a threshold. We provide numerous simulation results to showcase the efficacy of the proposed method.