A study on group behavior for efficient local communication in distributed mobile robot system

Local communication system is considered appropriate for cooperation of many mobile robots in terms of communication cost and capacity. Because the behavior of robots has a considerable effect on the communication efficiency in such a distributed local system, its design is an essential issue. In this paper, we introduce a simple group behavior, and analyze how it improves the performance of local communication system. The optimal group size is then obtained analytically by minimizing the time required for the information transmission to the number of robots desired for cooperation. The effectiveness of the analysis is verified by computer simulation.