A Robust and Efficient Dynamic Network Protocol for a large-scale artificial robotic skin

摘要

Artificial robotic skins are continuously in contact with their environment, and therefore highly rely on proper connections in their skin cells' network. With a static network protocol approach, the affected skin area is unusable after a connection failure. Therefore, we developed a dynamic network protocol for large-scale artificial robotic skins, which re-routes the network upon connection failures to keep the whole skin in operation. Furthermore, the protocol balances the load for driving larger skins without packet loss. For verification, we validated the protocol on a large artificial robot skin we have developed and analyzed its performance with a skin network consisting of up to 204 cells. The failure recovery of the protocol converges in at most 50ms. We showed that the balancing method achieves a packet loss reduction of over 30% compared to the previously used protocol.