2019/09/11 by Nathalie Majcherczyk, Carlo Pinciroli, Majcherczyk, Nathalie +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence #Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1909.04905
openalex publication_date 2019/09/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present an approach to the distributed storage of data across a swarm of\nmobile robots that forms a shared global memory. We assume that external\nstorage infrastructure is absent, and that each robot is capable of devoting a\nquota of memory and bandwidth to distributed storage. Our approach is motivated\nby the insight that in many applications data is collected at the periphery of\na swarm topology, but the periphery also happens to be the most dangerous\nlocation for storing data, especially in exploration missions. Our approach is\ndesigned to promote data storage in the locations in the swarm that best suit a\nspecific feature of interest in the data, while accounting for the constantly\nchanging topology due to individual motion. We analyze two possible features of\ninterest: the data type and the data item position in the environment. We\nassess the performance of our approach in a large set of simulated experiments.\nThe evaluation shows that our approach is capable of storing quantities of data\nthat exceed the memory of individual robots, while maintaining near-perfect\ndata retention in high-load conditions.\n