RoSe — A framework for multicast communication via unreliable networks in multi-robot systems

Multi-robot systems obtain their performance advantages from close collaboration of the participating robot systems. As the demand for such cooperation increases, the aspect of wireless communication is getting more and more important. To cope with the challenges of the wireless communication we propose an easy to use communication framework for a multi-robot system. This framework is designed for wireless networks, therefore it expects unreliable communication and can even cope with complete network separations. Using multicast as the default communication scheme, the framework can directly benefit from the broadcast nature of the wireless medium if such an optimisation is supported by the lower network protocols. We therefore introduce our multicast capable wireless routing protocol, which supports this optimisation. The software is implemented and frequently used in our experimental multi-robot system.