Effectiveness of Embedded Topology Controllers in a Multi-robot Network

This paper presents analysis and results for several experiments performed to verify the effectiveness of topology control algorithms running on a multiagent network (e-puck robots), in a multi-objective realistic hardware-based scenario. The main goal of such a network can be, for instance, disaster response, wildfire and environment monitoring, security tasks and also exploration and mapping (Scherer and Rinner, 2020). In doing so, the agents should be controlled in such a way that they have to ensure connectivity maintenance and robustness to failures while improving the coverage area. These issues were addressed by Ghedini et al. (2016, 2017, 2018), who proposed topology controllers regarding all these aspects and tested them successfully in a simulated scenario. However, it lacked the validation on a hardware-based domain, accomplished by this work. By running several experiments from different initial topologies, it was possible to analyze and verify the effectiveness of the developed topology controllers proposed in Ghedini et al. (2016, 2017, 2018). The hardware-based experiments shown results compatible with the simulated ones. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.