CoCo Games: Graphical Game-Theoretic Swarm Control for Communication-Aware Coverage

CoCo Games is a multi-robot coverage scheme focused on providing communication-aware coverage for a large Region of Interest (ROI). Specifically, CoCo Games can be used to coordinate UAV swarms to establish ad-hoc mobile wireless networks for stationary and moving ground robot teams in real-time. We also provide the ROS-NS, a real-time unified network and physics engine for simulating netork and robot dynamics in real-time.

Publications

Paper

@ARTICLE{9739846,
			author={Fernando, Malintha and Senanayake, Ransalu and Swany, Martin},
			journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters}, 
			title={CoCo Games: Graphical Game-Theoretic Swarm Control for Communication-Aware Coverage}, 
			year={2022},
			volume={7},
			number={3},
			pages={5966-5973},
			doi={10.1109/LRA.2022.3160968}}

Video

Software

Architectural Overview

Our system mainly depends on two simulation enviroments, Robot Operating System (ROS) and Network Simulator (NS-3). Briefly, NS-3 is a widely employed event simulator to design and implement network models. In this work, we delegate the task of network packet routing to NS-3 by accounting for wireless signal attenuation in the system. Further, to calculate the routing paths as the ad-hoc network changes, we used NS-3's inbuilt Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) algorithm.

The ROS environment simulates the UAV and UE robots’ movements while the NS-3 environment simulates the network events.
The two environments communicate using, 'ROS-NS', a UDP interface running inside ROS.
For moving ROI simulations, we use a team of UE robots, controlled using Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles (RVO).
Each UAV robot has an instance of the stage game optimization algorithm. As the UAV robots move, NS-3 simulates the network instantly and calculates the new routing tables.
At each stage of the game, we use the updated routing tables to identify the new neighborhood.

Open Source Code-Base

Multi-UAV simulator : https://github.com/malintha/multi_uav_simulator
ROSNS3 : https://github.com/malintha/rosns3
Graphical Games Solver (ROS Side): https://github.com/malintha/mrf_dynamics/tree/coverage

Maintained by Malintha Fernando, ccfernan (at) iu.edu