Analysis of the effects of failure and noise in the distributed connectivity maintenance of a multi-robot system

To perform cooperative tasks in a decentralized manner, multi-robot systems are often required to communicate with each other. Therefore, maintaining the communication graph connectivity is a fundamental issue. In this paper, we analyse the effects of different types of disturbances (failure and noise) in the communication between agents, upon a connectivity maintenance control strategy. The results show that the connectivity strategy is resilient to the negative effects of such disturbances under realistic settings that consider a bandwidth limit for the control effort. This opens the perspective of applying the connectivity maintenance strategy in adaptive schemes that consider, for instance, autonomous adaptation to constraints other than connectivity itself, e.g. communication efficiency and energy harvesting.