Author(s):  Malbasa, Veljko; Ivan Mezei; Ivan Stojmenovic;

Communication Aspects of Coordination in Robot Wireless Sensornetworks

Robots coordinate among themselves to select one of them to respond to an event reported to one of the robots, so that the communication cost of selecting the best robot, response time, and cost of performing the task are minimized. Existing solutions are either centralized, assuming a complete graph, or based on flooding with individual responses to a robot decision maker (simple auction protocol), ignoring communication cost and response time bound. This article proposes auction aggregation protocols for task assignment in multi-hop wireless robot networks. A robot collector leads an auction and initiates a response tree construction by transmitting the search message. Each robot, after receiving the message, makes a decision on whether to retransmit a search message, based on the estimated response cost of its robots, up to k-hops away. Robots wait to receive the bids from its children in the search tree, then aggregates responses by selecting the best bid, and forward it back toward the robot collector (auctioning robot). When distance is used as the sole cost metrics, the traversal aggregation algorithm (RFT – routing toward the event with the traversal of the face containing the event) can be applied and is an optimal solution. Several other protocols and their enhancements are also described here.

Publication Date:  2010/12/01
Location of Publication:  IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine
Publication Media Title:  IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine
Publication Media Publisher:  IEEE
Publication Passage:  page 63-69
Keyword(s):  Communication Systems (wired or wireless);