A Study on Local Communication of Multiple Mobile Robot System

For the robot cooperation in a large system with many mobile robots, the locality and concurrence of communication must be taken into account. The time-delay in communication becomes important for task planning in such a robot environment. We introduced a simple model of local communication among mobile robots and derived from a mathematical analysis that the information diffusion is described by a logistic function. The effectiveness of the analytical results is verified by a computer simulation which implements many mobile robots. Utilizing this simple logistic function, the time-delay required so that the task information is transmitted to necessary number of robots is computed, and unnecessary diffusion of the information can also be avoided. As an application of the analytical results to task planning, another simulation of cooperative task execution is undertaken, in which a method is shown to control the degree of diffusion by specifying the diffusion time according to task requirements.