Low Latency Communication for Energy Harvesting Robot Swarms (LOCUSTS).

Swarm robotics enables large groups of robots to collaborate on complex tasks, which requires low latency many-to-many wireless communication among them. Enabling such communication is still an open issue and is complicated by the fact that robots need to rely on unpredictable ambient energy harvesting for long-term autonomy. Traditionally, multi-hop wireless networks rely on packet-based store-and-forward protocols, where packets are fully transmitted to the next hop, temporarily stored, and then forwarded further towards the destination. Such protocols require a lot of coordination among nodes, are energy hungry, and have a high latency. This makes them ill-suited to satisfy the requirements of mobile and ambiently-powered robot swarms. We instead propose a radically different solution, based on symbol-synchronous wireless transmission, where nodes forward each received data symbol immediately. This allows all nodes in the network to transmit the packet in parallel, reducing latency by several orders of magnitude. This project is the first attempt to apply symbol-synchronous transmissions in a highly mobile environment with severe energy constraints. We will design two energy efficient symbol-synchronous transceivers, based on infrared (IR) and radio frequency (RF) waves respectively. Additionally, we will investigate energy efficient symbol-synchronous network protocols for ambiently-powered robot swarms and develop a robot prototype using both the IR and RF transceivers.

Keywords:ROBOTIC SYSTEM, WIRELESS NETWORKS, WIRELESS COMMUNICATION

Disciplines:Networking and communications, Wireless communications

Project type:Collaboration project