Mapping the impact of faults in a multi-robot team

Abstract

Reliable communication is a critical factor for ensuring robust performance of multi-robot teams. A selection of results are presented here comparing the impact of poor network quality on team performance under several conditions. Two different processes for emulating degraded network signal strength are compared in a physical environment: modelled signal degradation (MSD), approximated according to increasing distance from a connected network node (i.e. robot), versus effective signal degradation (ESD). The results of both signal strength processes exhibit similar trends, demonstrating that ESD in a physical environment can be modelled relatively well using MSD.