Research On Content-Based Information Dissemination In Swarm Robotics System

With the development of robot technology, study of swarm robotics collaboration has become a hot research at home and abroad, such as rescue missions and battlefield deployments. Communication and information sharing is essential to efficient collaboration in swarm robotics system, however, when the amount of swarm increasing, some challenges emerge from this kind of network.Firstly, network composed by swarm robotics has no infrastructure, and often suffers from intermittent connectivity, also its topology changes rapidly. In traditional approach, communication and information dissemination are realized by establishing and maintaining the routing according to topology of the network. However, when the number of robotics increases, traditional routing can hardly guarantee reliable communication and information dissemination. Secondly, the devices carried by individuals may have limited computing and storage capabilities, also the bandwidth is restricted. We have to consider these limited prerequisites.Independent of network topology, Epidemic algorithm proposed a contact-based information dissemination model. By random movement and pair-wise contact, nodes got new messages from each other, diffused messages in a flooding pattern. This algorithm gains high delivery ratio and low dissemination delay, but leads to huge overhead. In reality application, storage ability turns into bottleneck. So we propose a content-based data dissemination algorithm combined with contact-based approach.We use three performance metrics evaluate the performance of the dissemination algorithm, success delivery ratio, average delivery delay and average consumed buffer size. The key point of our algorithm is that nodes exchange information according to respective interests with each other; simultaneously, nodes exploit gathered history neighbor interests to decide whether to be a broker or not, for improving data dissemination efficiency.The main research topics include the following:(1) Propose a content-based data dissemination algorithm combined with contact-based approach, realize this algorithm on NS2, do comparative simulation analysis according to three performance metrics;(2) Design CC2430-based protocol stack, construct communication platform based on swarm robotics, and demonstrate the feasibility of our dissemination algorithm.In the network constructed by swarm robotics,in this paper,we propose a content-based data dissemination algorithm combined with contact-based approach and introduce the realization of our algorithm model in detail, do comparative simulation with the Epidemic algorithm and opportunistic content-based dissemination strategy, at last, we get the conclusion that our algorithm gains good performance on delivery ratio and transmission delay, also we prove the feasibility of our algorithm on hardware.