Performance evaluation of auctions WLAN for RoboCup multi-robot cooperation

Abstract

A three-level architecture for a team of autonomous cooperative robots has been proposed. A dynamic Joint-Commitment scheme is proposed to support the formulation of relational behaviors for cooperative robots playing soccer. Teamwork between two robots which know from each other that they are committed to a relational behavior may pass the ball from one robot to another, receive the ball and kick, and handle exceptions. The joint commitment is established based on a finite state machine and a messaging system to: (1) synchronize the pass behavior, (2) reiterate the process and extend the pass to another partner, or (3) break the commitment and search for a new partner depending on dynamic game conditions. To provide dynamic joint-commitment and needed synchronization a fast, reliable, and power aware communication model is needed for Ad-Hoc wireless networks forming a cooperating multi-robot system. Current techniques are based on client-server, Publish/Subscribe, and Peer/Peer communication which are not suitable. For this we implemented and evaluated an auction based communication model based on (1) TCP Peer to Peer Scheme, (2) UDP Peer to Peer (UPTP) Scheme, and (3) UDP Broadcast and Token Passing (UBTP) scheme. Evaluation reports the distribution of auction completion times and power consumption for auction-based and peer-to-peer communication.