Abstract
Wireless communications are one of the technical problems that must be addressed by cooperative robot teams. The wireless medium often becomes heavily loaded and the robots may take too long to successfully transmit information, resulting in outdated shared data or failures in cooperative behaviors that require synchronization among teammates. This paper introduces a novel solution to enable the immediate transmission of synchronization data in a way designed to reduce and better tolerate packet loss. It does so by categorizing the communications in multi-robot systems in two classes, robot state diffusion and synchronization messages. For the former, an existing adaptive transmission method (RA-TDMA) is used, and for the latter a novel solution was developed. Experiments show an important delay reduction when sending synchronization messages over a loaded network.
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Reis, J.C.G., Lima, P.U., Garcia, J. (2014). Efficient Distributed Communications for Multi-robot Systems. In: Behnke, S., Veloso, M., Visser, A., Xiong, R. (eds) RoboCup 2013: Robot World Cup XVII. RoboCup 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8371. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44468-9_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44468-9_25
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