Autonomous biconnected networks of mobile robots

Abstract

Groups of robots can be used in a coordinated fashion to achieve goals that individual robots cannot. One of the key requirements for this is being able to communicate amongst themselves in a timely and robust manner. This capability has been assumed as available in many multi-robot solutions but has not received enough attention in research. We approach the subproblem of moving from a connected network of robots to achieving biconnectivity. Biconnectivity provides both robustness to change in links and better bandwidth for communication by providing multiple paths to the destination. We take two approaches to the same problem - one a deterministic graph-based approach and the other a Markov random field approach. Both have their advantages. Preliminary results indicate much promise in both these directions.