RASS: Risk-Aware Swarm Storage

Abstract

In robotics, data acquisition often plays a key part in unknown environment exploration. For example, storing information about the topography of the explored terrain or the natural dangers in the environment can inform the decisionmaking process of the robots. Therefore, it is crucial to store these data safely and to make it available quickly to the operators of the robotic system. In a decentralized system like a swarm of robots, this entails several challenges. To address them, we propose RASS, a decentralized risk-aware swarm storage and routing mechanism, which relies exclusively on local information sharing between neighbours to establish storage and routing fitness. We test our system through thorough experiments in a physics-based simulator and test its real-world applicability with physical experiments. We obtain convincing reliability, routing speeds, and swarm storage capacity results.