Trenkwalder, S. orcid.org/0000-0001-7741-2642, Esnaola, I. orcid.org/0000-0001-5597-1718, Kaszubowski Lopes, Y. et al. (2 more authors) (2020) SwarmCom : an infra-red-based mobile ad-hoc network for severely constrained robots. Autonomous Robots, 44 (1). pp. 93-114. ISSN 0929-5593
Abstract
Swarm robotics investigates groups of relatively simple robots that use decentralized control to achieve a common goal. While the robots of many swarm systems communicate via optical links, the underlying channels and their impact on swarm performance are poorly understood. This paper models the optical channel of a widely used robotic platform, the e-puck. It proposes SwarmCom, a mobile ad-hoc network for mobile robots. SwarmCom has a detector that, with the help of the channel model, was designed to adapt to the environment and nearby robots. Experiments with groups of up to 30 physical e-pucks show that (i) SwarmCom outperforms the state-of-the-art infra-red communication software—libIrcom—in range (up to 3 times further), bit error rate (between 50 and 63% lower), or throughput (up to 8 times higher) and that (ii) the maximum number of communication channels per robot is relatively low, which limits the load per robot even for high-density swarms. Using channel coding, the bit error rate can be further reduced at the expense of throughput. SwarmCom could have profound implications for swarm robotics, contributing to system understanding and reproducibility, while paving the way for novel applications.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Swarm robotics; MANET; Infra-red communication; Channel model; e-puck; libIrcom |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EP/K031600/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 22 Aug 2019 11:02 |
Last Modified: | 10 Dec 2021 10:30 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Nature |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10514-019-09873-0 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:149980 |
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Filename: Trenkwalder2019_Article_SwarmComAnInfra-red-basedMobil.pdf
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