Robot teams cut communication while keeping high success rates
Minimum Sufficient Communication for Independent Behaviour Tree Robot Teams
Robotics
Summary
Robot teams often need to communicate a lot to coordinate their actions, but too much communication can slow them down. This paper studies how little communication is actually needed for teams of robots working independently to succeed. The authors tested different ways and amounts of messaging and found some cases where almost no communication is needed without hurting performance. Their method helps identify the minimum communication needed to keep the team working well under certain conditions.
What this means in practice
- •For warehouse automation teams: Reduce communication overhead among warehouse robots while maintaining task success rates, improving efficiency under low to medium traffic conditions.
- •For industrial robot integrators: Optimize communication policies to minimize data traffic in coordinated robot tasks with fixed behaviour control systems.
Authors
Sherry Jiang, Oliver Obst
Abstract
We present an experimental framework for determining sufficient communication in robot teams running fixed, independent Behaviour Trees with private blackboards. Within a declared policy family, we vary message content and admission frequency and measure traffic in recipient-weighted bits per robot decision. A dense sweep identifies candidate policies for comparison with full-state communication. We retest selected candidates and the reference on fresh, paired scenarios, using one-sided simultaneous confidence bounds to assess whether success remains within five percentage points of the full-state reference. The bounds also assess whether tested cheaper policies can be ruled out as insufficient. Depending on the evidence, the framework reports an exact minimum, a positive bracket, a sufficient upper bound, or an unresolved boundary. Experiments with eight content policies across four warehouse conditions identify zero communication as the exact minimum under low contention. In the scaled condition, the no-release policy at gate $q=0.992222$ is confirmed sufficient, achieving 96.33% success at an estimated rate of 738.55 bits per robot decision, or 0.544% of full-state traffic. The positive minimum remains unresolved. These claims apply only to the declared policy family, sampled gate values and operating conditions.