Latency Analysis of Coalescence for Robot Groups

— Coalescence is the problem of isolated mobile robots independently searching for peers with the goal of forming a single connected network. This is important because communication is a necessary requirement for several collaborative robot tasks. In this paper, we consider a scenario where the robots do not have any information about the environment or positions of other robots and perform a random walk search. We show through probabilistic analysis that as the number of isolated robots N increases, the expected Coalescence Time decreases as 1/ √ N. Simulations results are presented to validate this analysis.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Sameera Poduri, Gaurav S. Sukhatme
• Keywords: ICRA 2007, Mobile Robots, Robotics, Robots, Single Connected Network