Small-World Networks of Mobile Robots

Abstract

In order for a group of robots to coordinate collaboration during multi-robottasks (Fontan & Mataric 1998), they need to communicate in an intelligent, purposeful way (Gerkey & Mataric 2000). If small groups of robots are involved, global communication (broadcasting, or one-to-all) is usually sufficient. The main advantage is that all the acquired information is available to all the members of the group. However when the number of robots increases so does the amount of data to handle. Information overflow can affect the performance of the separate teams working on different subtasks while limitations of the communication channel can cause interference and reduce the overall performance. A potential alternative to this would be to support local (oneto-a few) communication amongst the robots. The connectivity of such networks (communication topology) is usually