Energy Efficient Communication with Lossless Data Encoding for Swarm Robot Coordination

Energy efficient communication is a key aspect of swarm-robot systems working collaboratively towards accomplishing complex missions. We propose a coding scheme inspired by Huffman encoding for lossless data compression, optimized for swarm robot communication. In this approach, the perception information on each robot/agent is encoded with known values based on which the algorithm is optimized. The proposed method is implemented and tested on the Edison platform with custom robot chassis. UWB (Ultra-Wide Band) based communication technology is integrated on this platform for enabling robot-to-robot communication. Experiments performed using the proposed approach on this platform demonstrate ~46% reduction in power dissipation compared to normal data exchange.