2021/03/23 by Beatrice Capelli, Hassan Fouad, Capelli, Beatrice +5
Computer Science · #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Petri Nets in System Modeling #Real-Time Systems Scheduling #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.12614
openalex publication_date 2021/03/23 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Connectivity maintenance is crucial for the real world deployment of\nmulti-robot systems, as it ultimately allows the robots to communicate,\ncoordinate and perform tasks in a collaborative way. A connectivity maintenance\ncontroller must keep the multi-robot system connected independently from the\nsystem's mission and in the presence of undesired real world effects such as\ncommunication delays, model errors, and computational time delays, among\nothers. In this paper we present the implementation, on a real robotic setup,\nof a connectivity maintenance control strategy based on Control Barrier\nFunctions. During experimentation, we found that the presence of communication\ndelays has a significant impact on the performance of the controlled system,\nwith respect to the ideal case. We propose a heuristic to counteract the\neffects of communication delays, and we verify its efficacy both in simulation\nand with physical robot experiments.\n