A self-adaptive network for multi-robot warehouse communication

With the growing popularity of e-commerce, warehouse communication needs to operate in a dynamic environment with multiple robots in the system. Such multi-robot systems have many practical issues in reality. Among the major issues, end-to-end reliable communication is seen to take up prominence in literature. The current work introduces a novel self-adaptive network structure with two of its essential sub-blocks namely 'Prioritization' and 'Optimal Path Selection' as part of communication protocol for effective and reliable communication. For the first sub-block, we propose transmission deadline and information content based priority model which significantly improves critical packet transmission success rate and for the second sub-block, an optimal path selection method is proposed as a new path planning method which is capable of reducing the outage probability of the failed transmission. A typical configuration of warehouse has been simulated in Network Simulator-3 (NS-3) and real warehouse data has been used in analyzing the proposed functional blocks. A closed-form expression of outage probability is also analytically derived. Results are promising to apply them for dynamic multi-robot systems in general, and specifically for warehouse applications.