Design of local communication for cooperation in distributed mobile robot systems

This paper presents a novel design methodology of local communication system for cooperation in distributed mobile robot systems. Our goal is to design a local communication system so as to transmit task information to necessary robots in minimum time without excessive propagation. In this paper, we propose a layered methodology, i.e. design from spatial and temporal aspects based on analysis of information diffusion by local communication between robots. The spatial design gives the optimal communication area minimizing transmission time for various cooperative tasks. In the temporal design, we derive the information announcing time to prevent excessive information diffusion. Finally, the simulations and experiments demonstrate that the design methodology is effective in constructing an efficient local communication system