Paper detail

The Effect of Communication Topology on Scalar Field Estimation by Networked Robotic Swarms

This paper studies the problem of reconstructing a two-dimensional scalar field using a swarm of networked robots with local communication capabilities. We consider the communication network of the robots to form either a chain or a grid topology. We formulate the reconstruction problem as an optimization problem that is constrained by first-order linear dynamics on a large, interconnected system. To solve this problem, we employ an optimization-based scheme that uses a gradient-based method with an analytical computation of the gradient. In addition, we derive bounds on the trace of observability Gramian of the system, which helps us to quantify and compare the estimation capability of chain and grid networks. A comparison based on a performance measure related to the H2 norm of the system is also used to study robustness of the network topologies. Our resultsare validated using both simulated scalar fields and actual ocean salinity data.