A self-adaptive network for multi-robot warehouse communication
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A self-adaptive network for multi-robot warehouse communication Ashwini Kumar Varma1 · Jyotirmoy Karjee2 · Debjani Mitra1 · Hemant Kumar Rath3 · Arpan Pal4 Received: 13 February 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract With the growing popularity of e-commerce, warehouse communication needs to operate in a dynamic environment with multiple robots in the system. Such multi-robot systems have many practical issues in reality. Among the major issues, end-to-end reliable communication is seen to take up prominence in literature. The current work introduces a novel self-adaptive network structure with two of its essential sub-blocks namely ‘Prioritization’ and ‘Optimal Path Selection’ as part of communication protocol for effective and reliable communication. For the first sub-block, we propose transmission deadline and information content based priority model which significantly improves critical packet transmission success rate and for the second sub-block, an optimal path selection method is proposed as a new path planning method which is capable of reducing the outage probability of the failed transmission. A typical configuration of warehouse has been simulated in Network Simulator-3 (NS-3) and real warehouse data has been used in analyzing the proposed functional blocks. A closed-form expression of outage probability is also analytically derived. Results are promising to apply them for dynamic multi-robot systems in general, and specifically for warehouse applications. Keywords Self-adaptive network · Multi-robot system · Communication protocol · Prioritization · Optimal path selection · Outage probability Mathematics Subject Classification 68M10 · 68M12 · 65D19 · 90B35
1 Introduction In recent years, e-commerce has gained much popularity, where people prefer to place their orders online and expect to receive it as soon as possible. Hence, to reduce its processing time, a number of studies in literature attempt to replace the existing warehouse system by a future generation warehouse where a group of robots process the
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order quickly and in a most cost-effective way. End-to-end reliable communication is a key factor over such multi-robot systems which enable cooperation among the robots. Networking capability of robots organizes them in an ad-hoc fashion. The ad-hoc network is characterized by its dynamic topology as each entity of the network can move around and connect in any arbitrary fashion. Each of these entities plays the role of a router, which discovers and maintains routes with other entities as they move around. In literature, the ad-hoc network is modified as mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) [1], robot ad-hoc network (RANET) [2], vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) [3], flying ad-hoc network (FANET) [4] and ship ad-hoc network (SANET) [5] based on the better suitability of the applications. Major issues of such network systems are dynamic topology, r
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