Experimental Analyses of an Efficient Aggregated Robot Processing with Cache-Control for Multi-Robot System

This study aims to develop a network architecture for low-cost multi-robot systems, in which robots operate with limited hardware capability and on-board computational power. Low-speed data processing and high latency time in communication are unavoidable issues in such a multi-robot system. To address those problems, this study proposes Aggregated Robot Processing – Robot Operating System (ARP-ROS) as a network architecture for low-cost multi-robot systems. This network architecture arranges a computing environment dedicated to data processing in a multi-robot system. In the proposed network architecture, most of sensor data obtained by each robot are transmitted to the computing environment via the communication network and processed there, and then control commands are sent back to the robots. For the data exchange in the network architecture, ROS2 node communication is employed because it uses Data Distribution Service (DDS) suitable for real-time distributed embedded systems. In addition, Cache-Control Algorithm (CCA) is introduced to the communication network for its performance improvement. This paper presents experimental analyses of the ARP-ROS with CCA in terms of latency time and data process failures.