Wireless communications for distributed navigation in robot swarms

Abstract. We consider a swarm of robots equipped with an infrared range and bearing device (Ir-RB) that is able both to make estimates of the relative distance and angle between two robots in line-of-sight (LoS) and to transfer data between them. Through the Ir-RB, the robots cre-ate a LoS mobile ad hoc network (LoS MANET). We investigate dif-ferent ways to implement a swarm-level distributed navigation function exploiting the routing information gathered within the LoS MANET. In the scenario we consider, a number of different events present them-selves in different locations. To be serviced, each event requires that a robot with the appropriate skills comes to its location. We present two swarm-level solutions for guiding the navigation of the selected robots towards the events. We use a bio-inspired ad hoc network routing pro-tocol to dynamically find and maintain paths between a robot and an event location in the LoS MANET, and use them to guide the robot to its goal. The performance of the two approaches is studied in a number of network scenarios presenting different density, mobility, and bandwidth availability.