Abstract
A prerequisite for a team of robots to cooperate is to maintain connectivity among robots. Connectivity maintenance has been extensively studied recently and several local and global connectivity maintenance algorithms have been proposed for the distance dependent communication topology. Local methods are known to be very restrictive and it will be shown that global methods, based on power iteration estimation, could be sluggish in the presence of communication delay and non-converging in large and sparse robot teams. Therefore, a method based on k-hop routing is proposed, where k is a design parameter to determine the locality level of the proposed method. Before any link disconnection, a test for an alternative k-hop path is executed and, based on its result, the disconnection is allowed or blocked. Blocking displacement for maintaining connectivity will eventually immobilize (freeze) the network. Therefore, a procedure for unfreezing the network is also proposed. Simulation results are provided to further investigate the proposed method.
Highlights
Connectivity maintenance has been an active research field in the last decades and it has been widely investigated
The control input is considered to be bounded, and no restriction is considered with the dynamic model of the robots as long as there exists a controller capable of steering the robot to a desire point, while satisfying a output constraint, which we have considered as assumptions in this work
In contrast with the belief of achieving more flexibility with a global solution for connectivity maintenance, this paper showed that, in the presence of communication delay, global approaches to connectivity maintenance are restricting the maximum achievable speed for the robots
Summary
Connectivity maintenance has been an active research field in the last decades and it has been widely investigated. A connectivity maintenance procedure should provide a supervisory or an integrated control method to preserve connectivity of the network (i.e., maintenance of at least one communication path between each two robots). In this paper, sluggishness of the global connectivity maintenance in certain circumstances will be shown and a method based on existence of an alternative k-hop path between robots with disconnecting links is proposed, where k is a design parameter for tuning the desired locality of the algorithm. A simple procedure for connectivity maintenance of a robotic network without communication delay is developed, and the effect of communication delay and dynamical constrains is considered. 2. A new connectivity maintenance method is proposed, that allows to tune the level of locality, from a completely local algorithm with k = 0 to a global algorithm with k = N − 1.
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