Mixed-Criticality Wireless Communication for Robot Swarms

In recent years the mixed criticality systems model has been adapted for use in shared-medium communication protocols, but it has not seen deployment into swarm robotics. This paper discusses ongoing work in the application of such a model to this domain, and argues for the benefits of such an approach. In many applications, reliability of communications is essential for the correct and safe operation of the robots. Given the inherently unreliable nature of wireless inter-robot communications, this paper argues for the application of timing- and criticality-aware communication protocols to be able to provide more reliable task-level performance of swarm robotics applications. In this work we define two illustrative swarm applications with two tasks at different criticality levels. Using simulation results we show that in the presence of wireless faults, standard best- effort protocols will cause application errors unpredictably, but a mixed-criticality wireless protocol can maintain important tasks at the cost of less important ones for longer.