On the Usage of General-Purpose Compression Techniques for the Optimization of Inter-Robot Communication

Managing the bandwidth requirements of a team of robots operating cooperatively is an ubiquitous and commonly overlooked problem, despite being a crucial issue in the successful deployment of robotic teams. As the team’s size grows, its bandwidth requirements can easily rise to unsustainable levels. On the other hand, general-purpose compression techniques are commonly used to transmit data through constrained communication channels, and may offer a solution to this problem. In this paper, we study the possibility of using general-purpose compression techniques to improve the efficiency of inter-robot communication, firstly by comparing the performance of various compression techniques in the context a of multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) scenarios using simplified occupancy grids, and secondly by performing tests with one of the compression techniques on real-world data.