Abstract
The increasing use of mobile cooperative robots in a variety of applications also implies an increasing research effort on cooperative strategies solutions, typically involving communications and control. For such research, simulation is a powerful tool to quickly test algorithms, allowing to do more exhaustive tests before implementation in a real application. However, the transition from an initial simulation environment to a real application may imply substantial rework if early implementation results do not match the ones obtained by simulation, meaning the simulation was not accurate enough. One way to improve accuracy is to incorporate network and control strategies in the same simulation and to use a systematic procedure to assess how different techniques perform. In this paper, we propose a set of procedures called Integrated Robotic and Network Simulation Method (IRoNS Method), which guide developers in building a simulation study for cooperative robots and communication networks applications. We exemplify the use of the improved methodology in a case-study of cooperative control comparison with and without message losses. This case is simulated with the OMNET++/INET framework, using a group of robots in a rendezvous task with topology control. The methodology led to more realistic simulations while improving the results presentation and analysis.
Highlights
The increasing use of teams of mobile cooperative robots in a variety of applications including area coverage, exploration and cooperative transport, is pushing research on cooperative control solutions
We make use of an initial method concept presented in [20] that relies on using OMNeT++/INET for improved network simulation accuracy, and we extend it with a four-step validation [21] combined with confidence interval statistical analysis [22], a factorial experimental design with confidence interval analysis [22], and a communicative modelling process [23]
We can the second factor, weperformance can observeunder a difference andtopology average infer Concerning that both algorithms have similar the gridbetween topology,circumcenter but under linear rendezvous, which is significant for the linear topology but minimal for the grid topology
Summary
The increasing use of teams of mobile cooperative robots in a variety of applications including area coverage, exploration and cooperative transport, is pushing research on cooperative control solutions. Cooperative robots may be considered as a set of movable sensors that exchanges information to complete a task These solutions are built on top of a communication network that has several imperfections such as delays and packet losses, ending up having a significant impact on team behavior [1], especially on decentralized control cases that rely heavily on explicit communication between robots [2]. These solutions are developed, tested, and validated through simulations, emulations, testbeds, or real robots [3,4,5].
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