On the Communication Requirements of Decentralized Connectivity Control - A Field Experiment

Redundancy and parallelism make decentralized multi-robot systems appealing solutions for the exploration of extreme environments. However, effective cooperation can require team-wide connectivity and a carefully designed communication. Several recently proposed decentralized connectivity maintenance approaches exploit elegant algebraic results drawn from spectral graph theory. Yet, these proposals are rarely taken beyond simulations or laboratory implementations. The contribution of this work is two-fold: (i) we describe the full-stack implementation—from hardware to software—of a decentralized control law for robust connectivity maintenance; and (ii) we assess, in the field, our robots’ ability to correctly exchange the information required to execute it.