A Unified Framework for Bandwidth Management and Motion Control of Collaborative Robotic Swarms

In this paper, we propose an algorithm that aims at unifying motion control and bandwidth management schemes via a supervisory monitor that manages a swarm of robots. The main idea of the proposed algorithm is to distribute available bandwidth among the existing communication channels in the network based on various factors representing changes occurring in the swarm and its environment. These factors include Interesting Events (IEs), Quality of Collaboration (QoCollab) between agents, Quality of Control (QoControl), and the Quality of Trajectory Generation (QoTG) of each agent of the swarm. The proposed algorithm is simulated on a fleet of two quadrotors, where the obtained results demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing network bandwidth consumption by approximately 42% as compared to two static algorithms with equal rates and equal bandwidth, while maintaining similar swarm performance.