Bringing Network Coding into Multi-Robot Systems: Interplay Study for Autonomous Systems over Wireless Communications

2026-03-18

AI Summary

This work addresses the degradation of cooperative performance and safety-critical decision-making in multi-robot systems caused by latency, packet loss, and out-of-order delivery in wireless communications, which compromise the validity of shared state information. To overcome these challenges, the authors propose an adaptive causal network coding mechanism that supersedes conventional retransmission protocols. By dynamically aligning transmission rates with real-time channel conditions and incorporating a channel-feedback-driven redundancy injection strategy, the approach ensures both timeliness and causal consistency of delivered data. Evaluated on cooperative localization and safe overtaking tasks, the method significantly mitigates stalls in in-order delivery, enhances consistency in state estimation, and improves deadline reliability, consistently outperforming existing retransmission-based schemes.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

Communication is a core enabler for multi-robot systems (MRS), providing the mechanism through which robots exchange state information, coordinate actions, and satisfy safety constraints. While many MRS autonomy algorithms assume reliable and timely message delivery, realistic wireless channels introduce delay, erasures, and ordering stalls that can degrade performance and compromise safety-critical decisions of the robot task. In this paper, we investigate how transport-layer reliability mechanisms that mitigate communication losses and delays shape the autonomy-communication loop. We show that conventional non-coded retransmission-based protocols introduce long delays that are misaligned with the timeliness requirements of MRS applications, and may render the received data irrelevant. As an alternative, we advocate for adaptive and causal network coding, which proactively injects coded redundancy to achieve the desired delay and throughput that enable relevant data delivery to the robotic task. Specifically, this method adapts to channel conditions between robots and causally tunes the communication rates via efficient algorithms. We present two case studies: cooperative localization under delayed and lossy inter-robot communication, and a safety-critical overtaking maneuver where timely vehicle-to-vehicle message availability determines whether an ego vehicle can abort to avoid a crash. Our results demonstrate that coding-based communication significantly reduces in-order delivery stalls, preserves estimation consistency under delay, and improves deadline reliability relative to retransmission-based transport. Overall, the study highlights the need to jointly design autonomy algorithms and communication mechanisms, and positions network coding as a principled tool for dependable multi-robot operation over wireless networks.

Problem

• multi-robot systems
• wireless communication
• network coding
• communication delay
• message loss

Innovation

• network coding
• multi-robot systems
• adaptive communication
• causal redundancy
• timely data delivery