断続通信下での大規模異種ロボット協調を可能にするMOCHA
Enabling Large-scale Heterogeneous Collaboration with Opportunistic Communications
通信が不安定な環境でもロボット同士が機会的に情報交換するゴシップ型プロトコルMOCHAを提案し、実機とシミュレーションで大規模協調探査の有効性を示した。
著者: Fernando Cladera, Zachary Ravichandran, Ian D. Miller, M. Ani Hsieh, C. J. Taylor, Vijay Kumar
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
Multi-robot collaboration in large-scale environments with limited-sized teams and without external infrastructure is challenging, since the software framework required to support complex tasks must be robust to unreliable and intermittent communication links. In this work, we present MOCHA (Multi-robot Opportunistic Communication for Heterogeneous Collaboration), a framework for resilient multi-robot collaboration that enables large-scale exploration in the absence of continuous communications. MOCHA is based on a gossip communication protocol that allows robots to interact opportunistically whenever communication links are available, propagating information on a peer-to-peer basis. We demonstrate the performance of MOCHA through real-world experiments with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) communication hardware. We further explore the system's scalability in simulation, evaluating the performance of our approach as the number of robots increases and communication ranges vary. Finally, we demonstrate how MOCHA can be tightly integrated with the planning stack of autonomous robots. We show a communication-aware planning algorithm for a high-altitude aerial robot executing a collaborative task while maximizing the amount of information shared with ground robots. The source code for MOCHA and the high-altitude UAV planning system is available open source: http://github.com/KumarRobotics/MOCHA, http://github.com/KumarRobotics/air_router.
