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research article

Hybrid Wireless-Local Communication via Information Propagation for Modular Robotic Synchronization Applications

Holdcroft, Kevin  
•
Belke, Christoph  
•
Sigrist, Alexander
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March 19, 2022
Advanced Intelligent Systems

Modular robots hold promise of adaptability, robustness, and versatility. Synchronization of modules is critical; if a module is asynchronous, not only will the robot fail to perform tasks properly, but its behavior may be self-destructive through self-collision. To avoid this, modern modular robots tend to have several separate communication systems. Wireless communication is used for interfacing with an external controller and synchronizing all modules, but is power-hungry and prone to congestion with a large number of modules. Neighbor-to-neighbor (local) communication is necessary for configuration discovery and for synchronizing orientations, but cannot connect to wireless. As it stands, local communication is underutilized and wireless communication struggles with scalability due to number. A novel hybrid protocol is presented, where only a fraction of the modules connect to wireless and act as hubs which propagate messages through the local system. This method reduces both energy consumption and global network traffic while maintaining functionality and adding redundancy in communication. Through careful selection of hubs, it is shown that the operational time of a modular robot can be extended by 20%.

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1002/aisy.202100226
Web of Science ID

WOS:000770636300001

Author(s)
Holdcroft, Kevin  
Belke, Christoph  
Sigrist, Alexander
Bennani, Samir
Paik, Jamie  
Date Issued

2022-03-19

Publisher

WILEY

Published in
Advanced Intelligent Systems
Article Number

2100226

Subjects

Automation & Control Systems

•

Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence

•

Robotics

•

Computer Science

•

cellular and modular robots

•

communication architectures

•

control architectures and programming

•

networked robots

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
RRL  
Available on Infoscience
April 11, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/186974
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