The Sound of Silence: Exploiting Information From the Lack of Communication

Abstract

Multiple robots can effectively acquire information from an environment and transmit it to a static base station. However, communication may not be possible everywhere in the environment, so robots must coordinate when and where to rendezvous with disconnected teammates. Such coordination presents challenges since knowing how long it will take to explore requires information about the environment, which is typically what the robots are acquiring. We propose a method to estimate disconnected robots' state and use observed <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">lack of communication</i> to refine our state estimation, allowing robots to plan for rendezvous or parallel exploration by predicting where teammates are likely to be. We show up to 87% improved performance for exploration tasks against a baseline approach that performs no such predictions.