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Multi-robot online sensing strategies for the construction of communication maps

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Abstract

This paper tackles the problem of constructing a communication map of a known environment using multiple robots. A communication map encodes information on whether two robots can communicate when they are at two arbitrary locations and plays a fundamental role for a multi-robot system deployment to reliably and effectively achieve a variety of tasks, such as environmental monitoring and exploration. Previous work on communication map building typically considered only scenarios with a fixed base station and designed offline methods, which did not exploit data collected online by the robots. This paper proposes Gaussian Process-based online methods to efficiently build a communication map with multiple robots. Such robots form a mesh network, where there is no fixed base station. Specifically, we provide two leader-follower online sensing strategies to coordinate and guide the robots while collecting data. Furthermore, we improve the performance and computational efficiency by exploiting prior communication models that can be built from the physical map of the environment. Extensive experimental results in simulation and with a team of TurtleBot 2 platforms validate the approach.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that all these path-loss models are independent of the used communication frequency, i.e., they do not restrict the analysis to WiFi/LTE, etc.

  2. We slightly change the notation of the original papers to make notation uniform and consistent with that used in this paper and to highlight variables and parameters.

  3. Gain is defined in terms of the antenna’s capability to send/receive signals in a direction.

  4. All experiments were conducted at night time, so the interference due to moving objects/humans is minimal, except for the people performing the experiment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Alberto Quattrini Li

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

    Phani Krishna Penumarthi, Jason M. O’Kane, Ioannis Rekleitis & Srihari Nelakuditi

  3. Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Jacopo Banfi

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Milan, Milano, Italy

    Nicola Basilico

  5. Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory, Politecnico di Milano, 20133, Milano, Italy

    Francesco Amigoni

Authors
  1. Alberto Quattrini Li
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  2. Phani Krishna Penumarthi
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  3. Jacopo Banfi
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  4. Nicola Basilico
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  5. Jason M. O’Kane
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  6. Ioannis Rekleitis
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  7. Srihari Nelakuditi
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  8. Francesco Amigoni
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Correspondence to Alberto Quattrini Li.

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This is one of the several papers published in Autonomous Robots comprising the Special Issue on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems.

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Quattrini Li, A., Penumarthi, P.K., Banfi, J. et al. Multi-robot online sensing strategies for the construction of communication maps. Auton Robot 44, 299–319 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-019-09862-3

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