Connectivity maintenance for robotic swarms by distributed role switching algorithm

Abstract

Swarm robotics requires a practical scheme to maintain operator supervision for the acceptability of systems' autonomy by humans. For this purpose, this paper proposes a distributed algorithm for continuous connectivity between robots and a base station to maintain the controllability and transparency of the swarm. This algorithm forms network topology among the swarm members and deploys repeaters to maintain the connection to the base station by a role switching scheme. Preliminary simulations have shown that the revised acute angle test reduced the cost of the network formation with the Gabriel graph topology. Through the simulated patrol missions, the proposed algorithm successfully maintained the continuous connectivity between the base station and the swarm members without significant inequality in the computational cost among swarm members. Furthermore, as the number of robots increases, the computational cost per robot does not increase significantly. These results indicate the distributed nature and scalability of the proposed algorithms.