The impact of communication and terrain characteristics on the accuracy of robot formation

Robot formation is one of the significant research directions in humanitarian, tactical, as well as space missions. For a task that requires multiple autonomous robots to work together as a team, coordinating positions each with respect to the other is essential. Therefore, a proper communication mechanism that periodically or aperiodically sends the path information is very important. The communication channel characteristics may impair the accuracy of robot formation. Further, terrain characteristics offer another constraint to have a perfect synchronization of paths between robots of a formation. In this paper, we study path deviations of the follower robot with respect to a leader robot, in an environment that has unpredictable obstacles and communication delays by modeling and simulating the virtual environment. We identified the impact of packet loss and obstacles distribution on the formation accuracy. For accurate formation or reducing the mean path deviation, periodic messaging is preferred in comparison to aperiodic messaging between leader and followers. Our results are useful for designing future robot formations for humanitarian, tactical, and space related applications.