Authors:
Gonçalo S. Martins
;
David Portugal
and
Rui P. Rocha
Affiliation:
University of Coimbra, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Compression Methods, Multi-Robot Systems, Efficient Information Sharing.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Engineering Applications
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Intelligent Control Systems and Optimization
;
Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems
;
Network Robotics
;
Robotics and Automation
;
Signal Processing, Sensors, Systems Modeling and Control
Abstract:
The efficient sharing of information is a commonly overlooked problem in methods proposed for cooperative multi-robot tasks. However, in multi-robot scenarios, especially when the communication network’s quality of service is less than desirable, either in bandwidth or reliability, efficient information exchange is a key aspect for the successful deployment of coordinated robotic teams with proper exchange of information. Compression is a popular, well-studied solution for transmitting data through constrained communications channels, and many general-purpose solutions are available as free and open-source software (FOSS) projects. There are various benchmarking tools capable of comparing the performance of these techniques, but none that differentiate between them in the compression of the typical data exchanged among robots in a cooperative task. Thus, choosing a compression technique to be used in this context is still a challenge. In this paper, the issue of efficiently communica
ting data among robots is addressed by comparing the performance of various compression techniques in a case study of multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) scenarios using occupancy grids, a cooperative task usually requiring the exchange of large amounts of data.
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