Localized Movement Control for Fault Tolerance of Mobile Robot Networks

In this paper, we present a novel localized movement control algorithm to form a fault-tolerant bi-connected robotic network topology from a connected network, such that total distance of movement of robots is minimized. The proposed distributed algorithm uses p-hop neighbor information to identify critical head robots that can direct two neighbors to move toward each other and bi-connect their neighborhood. Simulation results show that the total distance of movement of robots decreases significantly with our localized algorithm when compared to the globalized one, and our localized algorithm achieved 100% success on considered non-bi-connected networks. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work on localized movement control for fault tolerance of mobile robot networks.