Situational awareness for distributed mobile robot teams under limited communication

Abstract

A high level of team situational awareness is essential during complex, large-scale missions of autonomous mobile robots. When a situation appears that needs inter-agent interaction for cooperative decision-making, the basic understanding of the current conditions ought to be identical within the group. To achieve this requirement, all emergent information of acute importance must be promptly shared among team members. It is a non-trivial problem for large-sized and distributed robotic teams, especially under hard communication constraints. The problem considered in this paper is to nd an ecient emergency broadcasting strategy for search and survey operations of the robotic groups providing the fastest way for any agent to aware the remaining team in case of any unexpected changes. A number of simple ruled-based heuristics is proposed to treat the problem. The comparison between the suggested approaches is made regarding both the quality of the obtained solutions and the working speed.