Network Based Multi-Bot Awareness

A real-time multi-bot system consists of a group of robots working together to accomplish a common task. Each robot in the environment is provided with its own set of sensors, communication modules, vision systems, and control systems. A robot in the multi-bot environment is given complete autonomy or partial autonomy or teleoperated based on the task. For a robot to navigate autonomously, they should be capable of knowing their own position and pose in the environment, I.e., localization [1]. Localization is achieved by the process of Data Fusion. Data fusion is the process of combining the data from sensors that sense motion and sensors that represent the environment. For a robot, the data collected from its sensors are available only to itself. In a multi-bot system, the data collected from a single robot should be made available to all the other robots in the environment. Each robot collects the sensor data of its own and shares this information among all the other robots in the environment. The connectivity and exchange of data between individual robots is a key issue in a multi-bot environment. The multi-bot system performance and safety can be increased by high speed, low latency exchange of data between individual robots. Moreover, keeping a robot informed about others in their surrounding increases the knowledge and makes each robot take a global decision in the environment rather than local decisions [2]. This experiment demonstrates the high-speed exchange of information between robots and quantifies the delay elapsed in it. This also proves ROS2 has good performance over ROS and best suited for the multi-bot system [3].