Distributed Topology Analysis and Control of Communication Network within Multi-Robot Systems

One key enabler of Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) is each robots’ ability to share information with other robots within its communication range. This materializes as a communication network that enables cooperation within MRS to pursue a desired collective behavior via a given cooperative control framework. This research topic focus on how to optimize the network topology of MRS’s communication network, emphasizing on resilience and privacy preservation.

Research results:

• [CDC2021] [TNSE2022] Novel distributed approach that allows each node to distributively:

  1. estimate strongly connected components (SCCs),
  2. verify the absence of strongly connected property, and
  3. propose new links to ensure strongly connected.

  This allows verification and ensurance of strongly connected network without prior strong connectivity assumption or knowledge of the overall network topology (privacy-preservation).

• [ECC2024] An extension of the above approach for spatially distributed network