The Unbroken Telephone Game: Keeping Swarms Connected

Abstract

Connectivity maintenance plays a key role in achieving a desired global behaviour among a swarm of robots. Yet, lack of computation resources, low communication bandwidth, robot failures, and unstable links are tough challenges for connectivity maintenance in realistic environments. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized connectivity-preserving algorithm that can be deployed on top of other behaviours to enforce connectivity constraints. The algorithm takes a set of targets to be reached while keeping a minimum number of redundant links between robots, with the goal of guaranteeing bandwidth and reliability. We empirically study the performance of the algorithm, analyzing its time to convergence and robustness to failure.