The omnicast problem addresses the need of uniform information dispersal in a group of individual nodes (robots), that is, every robot needs to receive (and process) the observations processed by everybody else. The time (orthe numberof scheduleslots) it takes toexchange all distributedly collected information between all nodes/robots is a critical limiting factor for almost all practical swarm or distributed sensing applications. The establishment of a practical distributed scheduling scheme for this purpose is therefore crucial. Actual practical constraints of limited communication ranges, low bandwidth, asynchronous entities, and disturbances on the communication channels complicate this problem. This paper proposes a method of distributeddynamical omnicast routing (DDOR) which converges and solves the given problem, and does so with high performance ratings, as demonstrated in simulations. The problem of fast information dispersal in short range, and limited bandwidth communication systems in heterogeneous swarms of autonomous vehicles occurs in many applications. One example is the distributed control of large schools of underwater vehicles. 1. Motivation A practical, and for the underwater technology community highly relevant, scenario for distributed control methods is a school of autonomous underwater vehicles with broadcast communication facilities of limited range. Specifically the communication range does not span over the whole school. The size and structure of the school of submersibles are not known ap riori. Some information collected locally, such as a plume sample reading, a position estimation, or any other relevant piece of information, needs to be distributed to all neighboring robots and maybe even to all robots in the school. The only available means of communication is local broadcast. Colliding messages will lead to an unreadable signal which cannot be distinguished from noise on the communication channel by the individual nodes. Furthermore the communication chan
['Felix Schill', 'Uwe R. Zimmer']
Distributed Dynamical Omnicast Routing