Concurrent tree traversals for improved mission performance under limited communication range

— In previous work we presented a multi-robot strategy for routing missions in large scenarios where network connectivity must be explicitly preserved. This strategy is founded on the traversal of path trees in such a way that connectivity to a static control center is always maintained, while ensuring that any target that is reachable by a chain consisting of all robots is eventually visited. In this work we improve the strategy performance by extending its sequential onetask-at-a-time execution approach with concurrent execution of tasks. We demonstrate that the general problem is NP-hard and offer several heuristic approaches to tackle it. We study the improvements that these heuristics can offer in regard to several important variables like network range and clustering of targets, and finally compare their performance over the optimal solutions for small problem instances. In summary, we offer a complete characterization of the new concurrent capabilities of the CONNECTTREE stra...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Alejandro R. Mosteo, Luis Montano
• Keywords: IROS 2009, Robotics, Sequential Onetask-at-a-time Execution, Static Control Center, Strategy