2018/05/31 by Nathalie Majcherczyk, Majcherczyk, Nathalie, Adhavan Jayabalan +5 · 3 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks #Robotics (cs.RO) #cs.MA #cs.RO
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1806.00150
8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to IROS 2018
openalex publication_date 2018/05/31 · arxiv created 2018/06/01 · arxiv updated 2018/06/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a decentralized and scalable approach for deployment of a robot swarm. Our approach tackles scenarios in which the swarm must reach multiple spatially distributed targets, and enforce the constraint that the robot network cannot be split. The basic idea behind our work is to construct a logical tree topology over the physical network formed by the robots. The logical tree acts as a backbone used by robots to enforce connectivity constraints. We study and compare two algorithms to form the logical tree: outwards and inwards. These algorithms differ in the order in which the robots join the tree: the outwards algorithm starts at the tree root and grows towards the targets, while the inwards algorithm proceeds in the opposite manner. Both algorithms perform periodic reconfiguration, to prevent suboptimal topologies from halting the growth of the tree. Our contributions are (i) The formulation of the two algorithms; (ii) A comparison of the algorithms in extensive physics-based simulations; (iii) A validation of our findings through real-robot experiments.