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Published October 2022 | Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

ACHORD: Communication-Aware Multi-Robot Coordination With Intermittent Connectivity

Abstract

Communication is an important capability for multi-robot exploration because (1) inter-robot communication (comms) improves coverage efficiency and (2) robot-to-base comms improves situational awareness. Exploring comms-restricted (e.g., subterranean) environments requires a multi-robot system to tolerate and anticipate intermittent connectivity, and to carefully consider comms requirements, otherwise mission-critical data may be lost. In this paper, we describe and analyze ACHORD (Autonomous & Collaborative High-Bandwidth Operations with Radio Droppables), a multi-layer networking solution which tightly co-designs the network architecture and high-level decision-making for improved comms. ACHORD provides bandwidth prioritization and timely and reliable data transfer despite intermittent connectivity. Furthermore, it exposes low-layer networking metrics to the application layer to enable robots to autonomously monitor, map, and extend the network via droppable radios, as well as restore connectivity to improve collaborative exploration. We evaluate our solution with respect to the comms performance in several challenging underground environments including the DARPA SubT Finals competition environment. Our findings support the use of data stratification and flow control to improve bandwidth-usage.

Additional Information

© 2022 IEEE. Manuscript received 24 February 2022; accepted 27 June 2022. Date of publication 22 July 2022; date of current version 2 August 2022. This letter was recommended for publication by Associate Editor X. Yu and Editor M. A. Hsieh upon evaluation of the reviewers' comments. This work was supported in part by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a Contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant 80NM0018D0004, in part by FUNDEP, in part by NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship under Grant 80NSSC19K1189, in part by NSF under Grant 1846340, in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through Project EB-CON under Grant PID2020-119244GB-I00, in part by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and in part by the European Commission through the Project CANOPIES under Grant H2020-ICT-2020-2-101016906. We gratefully acknowledge all members of Team CoSTAR. We also thank Belal Wang and Silvus Technologies for their hardware and technical expertise, and Kentucky Underground Storage for access to their facilities.

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023