  In this paper we study the time delays affecting the diffusion of information
in an underwater heterogeneous robot swarm, considering a time-sensitive
environment. In many situations each member of the swarm must update its
knowledge about the environment as soon as possible, thus every effort to
expand the knowledge horizon is useful. Otherwise critical information may not
reach nodes far from the source causing dangerous misbehaviour of the swarm. We
consider two extreme situations. In the first scenario we have an unique
probabilistic delay distribution. In the second scenario, each agent is subject
to a different truncated gaussian distribution, meaning local conditions are
significantly different from link to link. We study how several swarm
topologies react to the two scenarios and how to allocate the more efficient
transmission resources in order to expand the horizon. Results show that
significant time savings under a gossip-like protocol are possible properly
allocating the resources. Moreover, methods to determine the fastest swarm
topologies and the most important nodes are suggested.

Robotics