Measuring the Effects of Communication Quality on Multi-robot Team Performance

摘要

Maintaining network connectivity is crucial for multi-robot and human-robot teams. If robots lose their network connection, they cannot receive commands or share sensor data with teammates. Most research in the multi-robot systems and human-robot interaction communities assumes 100% network connectivity, 100% of the time; but this is unrealistic for real-world domains. Indeed, this assumption could be associated with significant risk, depending on the robots' task domain. This paper presents preliminary results for measuring the impact of communication loss on multi-robot team performance. A series of controlled experiments were conducted, with physical and simulated robots, where the probability of packet loss is gradually increased from 0% to 75%. The experiments show that the multi-robot team exhibits a non-linear decrease in performance with respect to an increase in percentage of packets dropped.