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Abstract—In multi-robot system (MRS), energy consumption and starvation are the major problem while using IEEE 802.11 protocol. The
starvation problem is determined by Contention window, i.e., a communication frame between source and destination. Previous work on
contention window of MAC IEEE 802.11 has a series of window size by doubling their size when it is waiting for the communication channel,
example 8, 16, 24, to 1024. In the proposed work the contention window is incremented and decremented using natural logarithm to achieve
effective communication. By using trapezoidal fuzzy logic the energy consumption between robots used least energy to nearest node and high
energy to farthest node based on the link quality, distance, noise and received signal strength between the neighboring nodes. Thus gets good
routing.
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Potential applications enabled by this technology include
1 INTRODUCTION multimedia Internet-enabled cell phones, smart homes and
T HE study of multi-robot systems has received appliances, automated highway systems, video
increased attention in recent years. A Multi-Robot teleconferencing and distance learning, autonomous sensor
system is comprised of several systems working networks, robotics etc. However, supporting these
together as a whole. It is a multitude of systems each with applications using wireless techniques poses a significant
structure, sensors, actuators & processors. It has a technical challenge. Wireless communication in robot
capability of interacting with each other to fulfil necessary causes high overheads and conflictions.
goals. Ability to communicate and control the robot in a The wireless communication channel is characterized by
multi-robot system is a challenging task. long bandwidth-delay, dynamic connectivity, and error
The issue of communication in multi-robot system has prone transmission. The robots are often equipped with
been studied extensively since distributed system was low-cost low-power short-range wireless network
taken into robotics research. The communication in multi- interfaces, which only allow direct communication with
robot system is divided into two type’s implicit and explicit their near neighbours. Hence, it is virtually impossible for
communication [4]. The distinction between them is, the each node to know the entire network topology at any
implicit communication occurs as a side effect of other given time. Under these circumstances the only practical
actions or “through the world”, whereas explicit approach to distributed command, control and sensing is to
communication is a specific act designed particularly to employ an ad hoc wireless networking scheme.
convey information to other robots on the team. Several In contrast to a WLAN network that needs some base
researchers have studied the effect of communication in towers, an ad hoc network is an infrastructure-less network
multi-robot systems performance in a variety of tasks and where the nodes themselves are responsible for routing
have said that communication will provide the teams of packets. Mobile nodes communicate with each other using
robot to communicate effectively for the given task. multihop wireless links. There is no stationary
In the networked robotics area, researchers try to realize infrastructure, e.g., no base stations. Each node in the
group behaviours found in small insects or animals, in network also acts as a router, forwarding data packets for
order to control and coordinate a team of robots. Especially, other nodes. Furthermore, because the topology in such a
real-time wireless communication can help dynamic network can be highly dynamic, traditional routing
resource management and self-organization for a team of protocols can no longer be used.
cooperative robots. The multiple robots communicate with Here AODV protocol is used for performance evaluation
each other, sharing the same mission, naturally through of a multi-robot system. Consider a group of mobile robots
wireless communications. In this respect, wireless that are required to autonomously disperse throughout a
communication is an excellent candidate for inter-robot region, perform distributed sensing, monitoring or
information exchange. surveillance, and pass the sensed data to a single collection
Wireless communications is a rapidly growing segment point. The robots are most likely equipped with only low
of the communications industry, with the potential to power wireless transceivers whose range is too short to
provide high-speed high-quality information exchange allow direct communication with the data collection point,
between portable devices located anywhere in the world. but sufficient to allow robots to communicate with close
Priya Shanmugam, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry-8.
© 2010 Journal of Computing
http://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing/
63
neighbours. These circumstances qualify an ad hoc wireless samplings of the research that is currently going on in the
networking scheme as a unique choice. field of multi-robot communication system are provided.
The design of ad hoc networks has focused on the Since the advent of high-performance wireless local area
development of dynamic routing protocols that can network (WLAN) at relatively low cost, its use for wireless
efficiently find routes between two communicating nodes. communication among multi-robot has become a practical
The routing protocol must be able to cope with the mobility proposition. In this paper, several communication
of nodes, which often changes the network topology approaches and protocols in multi-robot communication
drastically and unpredictably. domain are discussed. They have also presented some
Next, the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, the de facto communication aspects in multi-robot system, such as cost
standard for wireless LANs, includes a distributed evaluation, wireless network layered model and energy-
coordination function (DCF) mode usable for ad hoc optimized protocols. The challenge in these systems is to
network architectures. The IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is maintain communication even when connections between
designed to provide efficient and reliable frame exchange robots may change dynamically and unexpectedly. This
over the shared wireless channel. Consequently, this work has extended to achieving fault tolerance in multi-
protocol has a rather limited view of the network robot communication, such as setting up and maintaining
conditions. The information available to it is the status of its distributed communications network and ensuring
direct neighbours. communication reliability.
The present work concentrates on communication issues Ulf Witkowski et al [5] proposed a cell- based network
in ad hoc multi-robot wireless communication. Among the with master nodes in each cell forming the basic structure
issues in robotic communication we have taken starvation of the network. Some nodes formed by specially equipped
and energy consumption problem. I.e., when more than robots act as beacons to uniformly span the network. These
one robot tries to communicate using the same channel robots have a role as reference points when positioning
collision may occur that leads to starvation and energy level other mobile robots or humans and at the same time form
may be saved by using least energy for nearest node and the infrastructure to support communication all over the
more energy for farthest node i.e. above 4 or 5 hops (energy search area. They have proposed the cell based approach
consumption problem). and a service discovery protocol. By using this protocol the
The proposed work gives a model that will accommodate robots will be able to efficiently locate resources and
the performance issues of energy consumption and services available in the network.
starvation problem that occur in MAC layer. The framework RoboNet presented by Antonio Chella et
al [6] adopts a composite networking architecture, in which
2 RELATED WORK a hybrid wireless network, composed by commonly
Over the last years considerable progress has been available Wi-Fi devices, and the more recently developed
achieved in the design of control systems for teams of wireless sensor networks, operates as a whole in order to
mobile robots which perform complex tasks like provide a communication backbone for the robots and to
exploration and map building or search and rescue and in extract useful information from the environment. It allows a
Robot Soccer games etc. Osman Parlaktuna et al [1] team of robots to enhance their perceptive capabilities
proposed a sensor based coverage algorithm to multi-robot through coordination obtained via a hybrid communication
system. By considering the energy capacities of mobile network. The purpose of the framework is the coordination
robots they detected the path but does not work well in of a group of robots moving in a structured indoor
dynamic environment. environment in order to manage automatically guided
Jim Pugh et al [2] proposed the algorithm for the control museum tours. Besides the benefits that are expected to
of robot formation. The formation with the triangular lattice emerge from cooperation, a major difficulty arises from the
structure is created using distributed control rules, using fact that all involved entities must achieve efficient
only local information on each robot. In order to make coordination, while acting independently and
formation they concentrated on scalability with respect to autonomously from each other; moreover, an additional
number of robots. There is no evidence that the algorithm difficulty is represented by the need of providing fault
will not work for larger groups of robots although its tolerance to the whole system. The robustness of the
performances might be gracefully decreasing with large communication protocol implemented in the proposed
swarms. framework has been enforced through a fault-tolerant
Pagello et al [3] considers the properties that a multi- leader election mechanism, which allows for an easy
robot system exhibits to perform an assigned task extension process of the innate system knowledge with new
cooperatively. They address the two issues in their paper, information acquired during run-time.
first dynamic role assignment in a team of robots, and Feng-Li Lian et al [7] proposed a dispersion movement
second one deal with the problem of sharing the sensory algorithm for multi-robot systems with simple
information to cooperatively track moving objects. Computation and easily obtainable information. In
Xiao-Lin Long et al [4] presented some wireless addition, a dispatch control rule is proposed based on the
communication schemes and their applications. Broad dispersion algorithm. The dispersion and dispatch control
contention window size and never get the channel, so, it size of contention window causes the packet collision in the
will starve for the particular communication channel. At network.
last it will discard its communication with that channel. The Fig 2 shows the connection establishing before
The proposed algorithm presents a solution for starting communication. There is n no. of robots. Here we
starvation problem in single communication channel and tested with 21 robots. R21 is the destination robot. Each
sharing the channel to other nodes by incrementing and node will have its own CW size. In the below fig it shows
decrementing the contention window size. that the nodes R1, R7 & R4 trying to access the same
communication channel from R21 by sending the RTS
packet.
The Fig 3 describes that after receiving the RTS packet
the destination node will check the CW size of each node
and send the CTS packet to node that has minimum CW.
Here it sends the CTS packet to R1. The node with
maximum CW size will choose a back off timer and double
its size. The maximum size for CW is 1024 and minimum
size is 32. When the CW reaches Max size it will discard
from the communication. The R1 will decrease its size by
resetting to original value 32 and it will get the channel
again and again, so the nodes R7 & R4 will not get the
communication channel, here the starvation occurs.
From the proposed algorithm the channel is shared by all
the nodes without any collision and starvation problem by
incrementing and decrementing the CW size using natural
logarithm log (x).
Fig 2. Nodes sending RTS packet for accessing the channel The Fig 3 shows that the communication channel is
shared between those two sources and without any
STarve algorithm (ST) collision by implementing the proposed algorithm.
For, incrementing and decrementing
Procedure Starv_solu
1. /* Let R1 to Rn be the no. of robots */ Incrementing = CW + log (CW)
2. Set MaxCW, MinCW, CW // Maximum Contention
window (CW), Minimum CW. Decrementing = CW – log (CW)
3. Set Stime, Maxt // Simulation time, maximum time
for end of simulation.
4. While (Stime<=Maxt)
5. N no. of robots sends RTS packet to destination in single
channel asking for communication access.
6. If the destination is not idle sends the CTS packet.
7. Only if (CW=MinCW) and send the CTS packet to access the
communication channel
8. MaxCW nodes will put in back off timer.
9. Back off timer increase its CW size by CW + log (CW).
10. The MinCW node, which got communication, will reset its
value to CW – log (CW) when finishing its communication.
11. Now the destination will send CTS packet to waiting nodes that
have MinCW.
12. The waiting node, which reaches the MaxCW, will discard from
waiting for the channel.
13. Do
14. End Procedure
Fig 3. Node 21 sends the CTS packet to access the communication to
The 802.11 uses back off timer to access the channel. The the minCW node
Back off timer is fully depends on Contention window
(CW). The CW is increased when it not gets the channel
access. In the present work we increment and decrement In Fig 4. The communication channel is shared between
the contention window size by using natural logarithm node R1 and R7 and R4 is discarded because it reaches the
rather than doubling its size (2n), because by doubling the max value. The throughput for this is measured and shown
460
440
Total Energy in Joules
420
400 Without EC
380 With EC
Fig 8. The second group which not get the communication channel and
in waiting state. 360
340
320
2 4 8 16 32
Number of nodes
5 CONCLUSION
The proposed work discusses the problems of starvation
and energy consumption in multi-robot system through
wireless communication channel. A better throughput is
achieved while the system is in starvation by incrementing
and decrementing the contention window size by natural
logarithm instead of doubling its window size. The energy
consumption is calculated based on link quality, distance,
Fig 9. Communication allocated to the smallest CW size node
noise and received signal strength between the
neighbouring nodes.
REFERENCES
[1] Osman Parlaktuna, Aydin Sipahioglu, Gokhan Kirlik, Ahmet